THE APOCALYPSE EQUATION

2011-04-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

2011-04-16T06:39:00.000-07:00

2007-01-26T21:28:00.009-08:00

THE APOCALYPSE EQUATION

(Lost Fan Fiction)

The Alternative One

Amelia Crater

November 2006

New Chapters added weekly

(see sidebar for Chapter headings or scroll down to read)

Chapter One: Saving the Day

2007-01-26T21:28:00.008-08:00

Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. His eyes were wide open. Everything was dark, but Iben Powned knew his eyes were in fact open, wide open, so how come he could still hear the music? OK, not music. More like a musical metaphor: The ice cream truck circling the block as you’re writing the suicide note. Do do do do doo do. Do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do.

The melody had dragged Iben out of his restless sleep, forced him up off the couch where he’d spent the past four nights getting far less than the eight hours he was used to. Fully awake he deduced the music must be coming up from the street, rising up with the soot and smog from some infernal pushcart peddling Italian ices, roasted chestnuts or dubious herbal potions promising love, happiness or revenge. “Ay, yes,” Iben chortled, “A meal best served cold. More for me, please.”

Oh how quickly a man can turn. In the unlikely event anyone had asked, only a week ago Iben would have described himself as a painstaking man, slow to rile, quick to rationalize. Ask somebody else, not necessarily a good friend, those were hard to find, but someone who knew Iben for any length of time, say, an afternoon, they might have used other terms such as “set in his ways,” “nerd,” “geek,” a Brit might offer that “he’s a bit of a twerp.” Iben would not have corrected them, but he would have disagreed all the same for the very reason that he knew himself to be a man of fierce passions who simply did not find it necessary to exhibit them to random people in the nameless, faceless crowd. He chose to reserve his instinctual, primal machismo for the right moment--Do do do do doo do-- and it had just now arrived.

Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. In fact, Iben Powned was about to throw a tantrum, and if that didn’t stop the satanic melody, he’d throw a brick, or better still, both boxed sets of Lost DVDs that he now reckoned comprised the deadest weight on the face of the earth.

Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. He lumbered haphazardly across 15 feet of darkness--the maddening tune growing louder, more insistent--threw back the drapes and was struck dumb. Where before there had been air outside the window 16 floors above the Manhattan pavement now he saw nothing but a clear blue eye.

Ok then, still sleeping. Iben had just about decided to simply log off on this dreamscape rather than contemplate the nature of the reality on the other side of the glass when the eye in question pitched a bit and rolled aft exposing a leering lipstick greased grin.

This was, of course, no apparition. This was Ronald McDonald in humungous balloon form being readied for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Happy fricking holiday to you, too, McRonnie. Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. Iben listened more closely now, still uncertain of the source, but he thought he recognized that tune. Wasn’t that the first few notes of the “Cheers” theme song? Do do do do doo do. You want to go where everybody knows your name.”
Ha! Luckily Iben could still laugh at himself, or was it with himself? Anyway, now he got it, he wasn’t playing host to a haunted calliope, it was just his subconscious playing tricks. The tune had nothing to do about losing his mind and everything to do with losing his name.

****

Just short of a fortnight ago, Iben had been offered the big break he’d been waiting for when his agent, Hamish McIntyre, had called to tell him he’d landed him a gig writing a novelization for the hit ABC show Lost.

Iben had been toiling in the netherworld of cable TV novelizations, and before you ask, no, not the classy cult ones like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Firefly. So far Iben hadn’t gotten much beyond writing the tie-ins to Sci-Fi Channel original movies, but luckily there were lots and lots of them so it had been more than two years since he’d been reduced to picking the low-hanging fruit over at Lifetime, where he’d been required to assume a female pseudonym and write about luck in love a subject he new considerably less about than, say, string theory or the time-travel paradox. He liked to stick to what he knew.

He knew that in the literary circles Hamish traveled in, his write-what-you-know preference made him a plodder, maybe even a hack, but Iben never gave up his dream that one day his well-honed novelizationing skills would hook him up with a hit TV show, an assignment he would so ace that he’d be offered a shot at a script writing gig on a hit show, and consequently be set for life.

And last week, Lost had called Hamish and what did Hamish do? Did he look over his client roster and select one of those “creative” types who loaded up their novelizations with sly irony and post-modern in jokes. No he did not. Hamish called Iben--old reliable Iben, plodding Iben, Iben who always got the job done on time and on target. That’s what the network boys wanted, results on a deadline. Could Iben provide them with a novelization of “The Valenzetti Equation: Numbers of Necromancy” in 11 weeks? Iben most certainly could.

It wasn’t until he received the contracts that maybe a couple of doubts about that timetable began to surface.

“So, listen, Hamish. I got the contract but that’s it,” Iben said after he’d finally gotten through to his agent two days ago.

“They said they were sending DVDs,” Hamish replied distractedly. Iben was used to this.
Hamish had explained the only way he could keep on a low-tier client like Iben was to make sure the rent-paying A-Team writers were always his first priority. For instance, they got taken to lunch. Iben had never even seen the inside of Hamish’s office, but if he played this Lost card right, that situation was about to change.

“They sent the DVDs,” Iben said.

“Pretty nice deal, huh? How many DVD’s of Mansquito did Sci-Fi send over? Didn’t you have to buy it yourself?”

“Yeah, I was out of pocket on that one,” and, Iben recalled, he didn’t even get the job. “But the Lost people sent nothing about the book.”

“Yeah, well, here’s a funny thing about this show. The novelizations are handled by the marketing department not C.C. and Lindy.

“Ohmmmyea,” Iben mumbled vaguely.

“The show’s producers? Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof? Know who they are? Anyway, they are very worried about leaks. They don’t want to give away much. Make that anything. They don’t want amateurs messing with the mythology, taking off in crazy Atlantean riffs, diluting the truth of the overarching storyline.”

“I see,” Iben said. He did not, but if he had learned one thing during this ersatz writing career it was that no one needs to know what you don’t know. Let them work for it.

“So the deal they made with the marketing department is that if novelizations must exist, the writers can develop stories from the existing canon. The title should help. Think of it as a very loose outline.”

“No problem,” Iben lied. “One other thing, Hamish, the contract names me as author. You know I always use a pseudonym on these things.” Iben was saving his real name to grace the title page of his first script and he didn’t want its reputation sullied by the cheap tricks he’d turned to get him to that long-hoped-for debut.

“Ah, too bad you didn’t say something about that earlier,” Hamish replied.

“Earlier. I haven’t even signed the contracts yet.”

“Well you could probably change it, but it’s too late to keep your true identity to yourself, brother. Everybody already knows your name.”

*****

Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. Iben slammed the drapes shut, blinding the cyclopean clown. Where was that music coming from? Most certainly not from a friendly neighborhood bar. What did Hamish mean that everybody knew his name? Who was everybody? Why would they want to know the name of a for-hire hack shilling for the ABC marketing department? Iben continued to rant, pacing the length of his apartment from bedroom to living room and back, seeking the source of his distress, until he tripped over the dog.

“What do you want?” Iben asked, but he really meant was “why are you still here?” He’d hoped the blond Labrador Retriever would leave using the same mysterious methods under which he’d appeared five days before. Now, the mutt seemed to be trying to tell him something as it trotted over to the door, cocked its head as if to listen, woofing once or twice, then looking back at Iben. Iben cocked his head, too. Then he heard it, a soft, rhythmic knocking.

“Is that Morse code?” Iben had once novelized the Discovery Channel story of Marconi: Written in the Wind.

He opened the door to find, of all things, a beautiful girl. She wore a baseball-cap atop her chin-length brown hair, eyes hidden behind formidable Jackie O. sunglasses, and pointed a pistol at his midsection. Before Iben could register any of the many things he felt, the dog pulled a Lassie, grabbed the weapon out of the girl’s hand and loped away to the bedroom.

“That is a good trick!” Iben told her. “You’ve certainly demonstrated to me that he’s your dog, all right. I don’t think I've ever seen a canine do that outside the movies. He must be very special for you to have braved that crazy parade crowd out there,” Iben had made one of those primal decisions just then, ignoring the whole gun thing in favor the girl, a species with whom he had fewer lunches than he’d had with his agent. Now here was one on his doorstep, poised to enter his inner sanctum. Maybe the dog was not such a bad thing after all. And lots of girls carry guns, don’t they?

Iben ushered her into his bachelor pad.

“That’s quite a pooch you’ve got there,” he opined, looking around for the mongrel that was nowhere in sight. She went to the window, opened the curtain a crack and peered out. What she saw didn’t alarm her so Iben guessed the clown had drifted on.

“You know if you’re not in a hurry to get home, you can watch the parade from here,” Iben offered, but the girl switched her attention to the TV still playing the Lost DVD.

“I don’t usually watch primetime, but I’ve landed the darnedest assignment. It’s really ironic because the day I got it was the best day of my life, but it’s turned into the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Funny isn’t it how the best thing and the worst thing can happen simultaneously. I’m sure it has something do to with quantum physics; you know everything in a state of suspension, on and off at the same time. Ha! Shut up, Iben! That’s my name, by the way, Iben Powned.”

“I know who you are,” the girl said, her attention riveted on the scene in "Every Man For Himself" where Benjamin Linus shakes the bunny with an eight painted on its back until the animal keels over.

“Yes, well I guess that’s how you found me. So, do you follow this show?” Iben asked. “Cause, listen, if you could tell me what’s going on it would be a tremendous help.”

“I do not watch this show. It’s just a fiction bought and paid for by people who do not have your best interests at heart. People who have dark powers and darker intentions.”

“Don’t I know it,” Iben concurred with a chuckle. “TV execs are dark indeed. So here’s my dilemma. They’ve hired me to write a book that’s supposed to fit with other storylines in this silly show, but it doesn’t seem to.”

An accusatory stare beamed out from behind her eye shades. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“See that’s just it, I have no idea what any of it means. All they’ve given me to work with is a title: “The Valenzetti Equation: Numbers of Necromancy.” I’ve watched every single episode. I don’t think anything called the Valenzetti Equation was mentioned. I’m sure it must have something to do with those ridiculous numbers, but when Locke stopped punching in the numbers and the hatch exploded, everybody got out alive. The sky turned purple but the world didn’t end. It just seems like if the Valenzetti Equation has to do with the numbers that storyline has played itself out already. ”

“It’s not a story.”

“Well, I realize Lost has revolutionized TV storytelling.”

“No, you moron, it’s not a story. That song you keep hearing. The big clown looking in your window. The goddamn dog. Do those things seem like elements in a work of fiction or do they seem like things that are happening in your real life?”

“I’m not sure…” Iben sensed this might be a trick question.

“Geez, for once in your life just make up your mind,” the girl snapped.

“Yes, they are really happening,” Iben obeyed.

“Given that, do you think the numbers might also be real?”

“Yes,” Iben lied seamlessly this time, falling back on his old strategy of going along to get along.

“Then you will help us? You’ll write the truth even though the truth may cost you your life?”

“Yes.” Okay, mystery solved, he was still asleep after all. Maybe he could use some of this dream dialogue his book.

“Good. Then listen closely because what I’ve come to tell you may save you, me, everyone in the world. The island is not…”

Suddenly the dog became frantic, whining and lunging toward the window. He grabbed the drape and pulled it open. Outside a new balloon bobbled.

The girl recoiled in fear and turned to run just as the window explode behind him, a bullet struck the door as the girl slammed it behind her. Then shooting pain. Then nothing.

****

Do do do do doo do. Do do do doo do. His brain throbbed. Worse, when he pried his eyes open he was eyeball to eyeball with a dog. The dog. The dog with the gun still clutched in its jaws. Iben didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, but the room was dark and he was shivering. Then he remembered the blasted window…and the rest….he checked for blood, shattered bones…at least he hadn’t been shot. Taking stock he realized the girl was gone, the dog had stayed. She’d left her backpack, too, although Iben didn’t remember her having one. He propped himself up and fiddled with the pack’s zipper but resisted the temptation to open it.

Do do do do doo do. Do do do doo do. Iben snuck a reluctant peek behind the couch and there amid the shattered glass he finally found the source of the sound. It was a music box of sorts. A rather ingenious item, really: a tin wind-up toy featuring a polar bear riding a unicycle back and forth across a circus tight wire. In one paw he held a parasol painted to look like a canopy of stars. In the other paw he held a snow globe in which a mermaid and merman turned somersaults around a single pearl.

Iben , led by the dog, crept across the broken glass. He put his ear close to the toy. Do do do do doo do. It wasn’t playing notes, he realized. It was something else. He held the object close to his ear. Words. His name! Iben Powned is clueless. No. Iben Powned must do this. Not quite. Iben Powned is….

Chapter Two: Good Things Come in Small Packages…

2007-01-26T21:28:00.007-08:00

Useless… Iben eyed the nylon backpack on the floor with disgust. It probably contained several ancient plagues or even an incurable disease, he thought, perhaps even some outlandish genetic mutation. After hearing the peculiar story told by the girl he had no doubt that whatever he found inside would ultimately end up being very unhealthy for Iben Powned.

He opened the pack cautiously. The first thing he noticed was a label with the words “Property of” printed on it; below were the handwritten initials R. B. The rest of the compartment was filled with file folders stuffed with papers. There were several photographs, a few satellite maps and computer discs inside as well.

A tri-color brochure caught his attention. It was an advertisement for Paik Heavy Industries - Robotics Division in Lotus Valley and their breakthrough nanotechnology. Iben had, of course, read Creighton’s “Prey” years ago yet he certainly did not believe that self-replicating miniature robots would ever be practical or useful. But, he thought, it couldn’t hurt to do a little investigation and find out what, if anything, R.B. had been trying to warn him about, especially in light of the fact that stray bullets had recently been added to the equation. And Lotus Valley was just over the bridge, he reasoned.

Paik Heavy Industries was nestled into the far end of a small industrial park just off the interstate. Like most of the one-story manufacturing plants and businesses in the area Paik Heavy was of early 21st century construction, all corrugated metal and concrete, but as he drove to the visitor’s parking lot, he saw that behind the Paik factory was a small ivy-encrusted building surrounded by massive oak trees that had somehow escaped the recent renovations of the industrial park.

On the drive over, Iben had practiced his “just a humble writer doing research” speech and realized that he had fairly perfected this conversation over the years, which turned out to be more proof of his useless skills since the production plant offered free tours every half-an-hour. It seemed unusual to Iben that Paik Industries would be so frank and open concerning this aspect of their technology and research if they, like all the parties mentioned in R.B’s papers, were villainous.

The little mint-green paper hats and lab coats they gave out prior to the tour were a nice touch, he thought, as he stepped up onto the sightseeing trolley. As the guide began his scripted monologue, Iben quickly realized that all he was going to learn on this tour was the antiseptically canned script about robotics that every tourist received and that it would not help him with his research.

As the trolley neared a lighted exit he stepped off, quickly walked to the door, which, surprisingly, was unlocked, and found himself in an empty stairwell. Even more surprising, no alarms sounded. From the outside the Paik Robotics building had looked like any other one-story manufacturing plant in the industrial park, but the stairwell descended at least four levels from the one on which Iben now stood. He crept down the stairs silently.

As he made his way downward he could hear a faint but continuous buzzing coming from below. Near the bottom of the stairs he saw a stack of wooden archive boxes used for storing outdated paperwork. Each neatly stacked box was stamped with a “Hanso Foundation” logo. From behind the boxes he heard voices. Iben snuck a peek through the handle holes of a box to see two men talking in front of a very modern-looking wall of super-computers.

“Tom, we really need to shut it down and run a diagnostic check on the horde,” said a young man in a mint-green lab coat. His left pocket bore figures from “The Book of Changes” in an octagonal pattern.

“No, no the Sappers and the Shapers are working perfectly. It’s the Cerberus’ that need modification and we can’t afford to shut down the entire swarm for that. We’d have to re-set the whole program and that would affect too many stations.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?”

“We do nothing. We wait. See if they learn. Perhaps they’ll self-correct without any radical adjustments.”

Beyond the wall of boxes Iben witnessed something that scarcely moments ago he would have said could not exist. A large, plate-glass walled cell filled the entire rear sub-basement of the building. Behind the glass a murky dark black cloud of smoke floated ominously, almost cognitively, he thought, and it appeared to be studying his every move. A buzzing, like a great colony of bees, resonated from behind the glass. Iben was looking at millions, no, billions upon billions of microscopic nano-robots and the cloud from which they were composed seemed to be growing as he watched.

Astonishing as the cloud was, Iben also realized that the room outside the cell was filled with antiquated computer tape drives and old monochrome monitors, one of which showed the stairwell he’d just been in. He realized then that it was time to leave and as he quickly climbed the stairs the loudspeakers in the hallway began blaring, “Compound breached!” in a mechanical tone. He hurried up the stairs.

As he turned to exit the stairwell he saw the two men he had overheard talking coming towards him. Both wore mint-green lab coats and both were pointing at him. The longhaired pony-tailed man pointed at Iben, gestured at the young man with him and said, “Get him!” The two men raced up the stairs. Iben exited the stairwell just in time to hear the clunk of a dead bolt lock slam shut in the door behind him. Why would they lock that door now?

Iben had a moment to consider the conversation he had just heard. He leaned his back against the locked door.

Did I hear that right? he wondered. Sappers and Shapers? He knew that sappers were tunnel diggers and shapers seemed obvious but what in the world was a Cerberus? And what did that mean anyway? Nano-robots were usually used for medical purposes and molecular manufacturing but these, these were another breed altogether and there appeared to be three different types: One for tunneling, one for shaping and one for, what, barking? It just doesn’t make any sense. What are they tunneling into and what are they shaping? More importantly what are these guys really using nanobots for?

There were very few moments in Iben Powned’s life when he was truly and entirely frightened. Most recently when the brakes on his car failed, for instance, but when he heard the whispering buzz that appeared to be rapidly gaining on his position he realized a whole new realm of terror. The term frightened shitless came to mind. There was nothing for it but to run. So, he ran. A massive horde of nanobots appeared out of the air conditioning vents in the warehouse in a cloud and descended towards him. Iben ran to the nearest exit, fumbled his way through the door and quickly slammed it shut behind him. The buzzing gained in intensity but then disappeared completely behind the closed door.

He shuddered uncontrollably thinking about what he had just evaded and panic started to invade his reason. A sudden pain startled him out of the fear that was beginning to build up inside him. How did I scratch myself there? But it wasn’t a scratch at all. It was one of those miniature metallic nanobots trying to tunnel its way into the flesh of his arm. He picked it from his skin between two fingers and crushed it on the pavement under his shoe. Now that’s a satisfying sound, he thought.

Iben started walking quickly to his car but noticed that his race through the warehouse to safety brought him not out near the parking lot but into a cemetery near the ivy-covered building behind Paik Heavy Industries. Iben took cover among the ancient oaks that surrounded the graveyard, a small plot of grass with nine headstones in a three by three array. As he passed the headstones he had to do a double take. The bottom headstone read:

Thomas Werner Mittelwerk
April 15, 1842
August 16, 2004

One hundred and sixty-two years old! Iben could hardly believe what he was seeing. How could anyone live that long? Examining the headstone more closely he noticed that the number 42 in the birth year “1842” seemed different then the rest of the numbers. He traced it lightly with his fingers and… it clicked! The headstone slid forward and up revealing a hatch with metal stairs that descended into absolute darkness…

Chapter Three: Your Number’s Up

2007-01-26T21:28:00.006-08:00

The grave beckoned, its open maw offering safe haven to a desperate man and Iben, for one, thought that was pretty darned ironic: “Fear not, the bogey bots can’t get you while you’re safe in my embrace.” He could almost hear the sinister cackle of the crypt keeper as it swallowed him whole.

Well, maybe it wasn’t a cackle, more like a crackle, an electrical hum or buzz…they’re near. Iben took a moment to reflect on the deadly peril of his situation and how ill-suited he was to making life-or-death decisions in the moment. He swiveled his head looking for inspiration (which years of writing had taught him often involved much eyestrain) when his attention fell upon a miniature headstone next to Mittelwerk’s.

Good Things Come in Small Packages
RIP Frigga
Faithful and obedient companion
in this world and all others

Iben had to really squint to read it. It had to be carved in, like, 10 or 12 point type face to fit all those words onto that small tombstone. Nonetheless, he couldn’t rest in peace since the fierce horde-sound was nearly upon him. His brain screamed, “Do something!” So, he pushed the 42 on Mittelwerk’s headstone and the door whooshed shut with what sounded like a gasp of relief.
Iben then considered his chances of escape, pondering what ill-omen might have caused the beloved Frigga to be lately lamented and wondering if there was some deeper meaning to be found in the epitaph “Good Things Come in Small Packages.” Is it possible that Iben had nothing to fear from the tiny nano-beings? Of course, one had given him quite a scratch on the arm, but perhaps that nano had been malfunctioning. He guessed he’d soon find out as the blackish mass was just rounding the oak at the edge of the cemetery plot.

Then, above the droning din, another sound reached Iben’s ear, a desperate, yelping howl. That’s right! He’d brought along the blond lab planning to drop him off at the pound later. Apparently, he’d escaped the vehicle and just in the nick of time for Iben. The dog was throwing itself against the chain-link fence on the parking lot side of the ivy-covered building. Iben realized in an instant that the dog couldn’t get in only because it was not tall enough to reach the otherwise easy-to-open gate latch. Good dog! Iben sped toward the exit, but not before glimpsing the name on another of the nine headstones. This one was new and unsentimental. It stated simply:

Hugh McIntyre
1968 - 2006

Moments later, dog and man were into Iben’s Kia racing away from Paik Heavy Industries, out of Neptune City headed west toward the Garden State Parkway. Iben didn’t even take a breath for fear of sucking in errant nanobots until they passed the Naval Weapons Station in Earle.
“Wait a minute,” Iben said, “Hugh McIntyre. That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”

The dog made no reply, but panted anxiously, staring out the rear window as if not as ready as Iben to conclude, “Home free.”

“Hugh McIntyre. Hamish McIntrye. You don’t suppose they’re related in some way? If so, and I’m not saying they are, but if they were related they couldn’t have been very close or Hamish would have said something about losing a brother this year or having to go to a funeral. Then again, maybe Hamish didn’t know. After all, Hugh is buried behind a New Jersey factory next to a Mr. Mittelwerk, whose grave appears to come equipped with an escape hatch. Hey, maybe it’s a doggie door so that Frigga can let herself in and out.”

The lab, riding shotgun, perked up his ears at that, and Iben doubted it was because he appreciated the joke.

“Frigga?” Iben asked. “Do you know that name, boy?”

The dog spoke. Iben took that as a yes.

“Friend of yours? Girlfriend, maybe?”

The dog yelped more emphatically. Iben checked the rear view mirror and saw a Paik Industries cement-mixing truck bearing down. They couldn’t outrun it and on this late Saturday afternoon the sparsely trafficked highway offered no cover so Iben swerved off on the nearest exit and headed back toward the shore. The dog’s whine signaled the truck had done the same.
Iben drove on at a reckless speed, making aimless turns in what seemed to be a futile effort to elude the relentless pursuer. He was going to be Jimmy Hoffa’d, he supposed; buried under a ton of quick-setting concrete. He began to tremble and suddenly was drenched in sweat. Then he was choking, not breathing, dying.

“The nanobot musta got me, boy. I just didn’t know it til now,” he reported in ragged sobs to his canine companion.

“If it hadn’t been the bot it would’ve been the truck. I can’t fight something this big. God, I can’t believe that the thing I wanted most in the world, a stupid chance at a stupid network staff writing job, is going to be the death of me. I can’t believe my agent got me into this. And I mean got ME into this. Why me? Am I so insignificant, such a no-name nothing that when a killer assignment came in, the one that meant the writer would in fact die, he thought of me first? I suppose he knew no one would miss me.”

On wheels slick with Iben’s self-pity, the Kia careered wildly into Asbury Park city limits, speeding down the empty streets past the decaying carcasses of an abandoned, half-built high-rise, crumbling, deserted hotels and burned-out storefronts.

“This used to be the playground of the Jersey Shore,” Iben said, so shocked by the city’s haunted appearance he forgot his truck troubles and got his breath back. “I wonder what happened here?”

The dog barked sharply and stood up on the front seat. In the rubble-strewn parking lot where The Palace Arcade once reigned over the boardwalk now dangled strings of banana-colored lights and a banner announcing Benoffski’s Big, Big, Big Top Traveling Circus and Family Fun Carnival.

“Well, look at that, the circus comes to Creepytown,” Iben, never a fan of such dubious roadside attractions wondered if being shanghaied into white slavery--the fate of all lone visitors to carney world his mother always warned--would be his next adventure. “Did I mention that I hate clowns?”

Iben pulled into the parking lot, tucked the Kia between two Winnebagos and tagged along behind a posse of stragglers headed for the midway. They didn’t look like a fun group, much less family friendly. They exuded the jagged menace of meth addicts but viewed through an ectoplasmic blur. Iben saw the cement truck inching into the parking lot, and hoped the ghost gang was too oblivious to notice and man and his dog hitching a ride in their shadows to the midway

To buy them some time, Iben hit the first concession stand and assembled haphazard disguises: Bug’s Bunny ears and Slinky-eyeball glasses for himself and a couple of balloons to attach to the dog’s collar. He hoped that from a distance it would look like he was just another fun-loving dad taking his kid to the circus.

Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. There it was again. The music. Iben Powned has been duped. No. It wasn’t really saying that. Hamish tried to kill you. Shut up. It’s just a bunch of notes, Iben commanded the wild-eyed side of his brain to agree with the smart part, but he didn’t know how long that order would stand when he found the source of the sound. It was coming from a carnival game booth and the tune was emanating from an almost unimaginable variety of mechanical wind up toys offered as prizes. One of the toys was the acrobatic polar bear that had been pitched through his window Thanksgiving Day.

How could it be, Ivan wondered, that I would find those particular tin toys playing that oddly mesmerizing melody at a traveling carnival that I only came to because I was being pursued by killers in a cement-mixing truck? To call such a thing a simple coincidence beggared reason. Was it fate? Did everything happen for a reason, as John Locke was so fond of pointing out on Lost? Indeed this was just the kind of thing that would happen on Lost. So, Iben wondered WWJD? What Would Jack Do?

Iben imagined the handsome spinal surgeon standing in his place listening to that tune. In his mind’s eye, he saw jack’s eyes glaze over as visions of the past overtook him. Jack would be remembering the time he stayed up all night fixing his mother’s beloved music box instead of dissecting kittens as he had promised his dad he would so he would make the old man proud on the pre-med biology final the next day. Luckily, his dad came home from the hospital too drunk to notice the kittens were intact and Jack aced the test anyway. Unfortunately, when he got home from school with his A+ grade, the music box was re-smashed and his mother gone for good. Turned out the music box had been precious because it had been given to his mother by another man, a nice one who treated her well, and his father knew it, couldn’t stand competing with even the memory of her former happiness, and kicked her out of the house. And it was all Jack’s fault for fixing the damn music box.

Jack’s eyes would then come back into focus, the tawdry carnival with its cheap amusements suddenly filling him with hopeless melancholy tinged with bitter loss and he would turn a deaf ear to that sordid melody and walk away.

God, no wonder they were still stuck on that island. Every experience was transformed into a metaphorical redo of some past misery that left them incapable of action. Well, Iben thanked heaven that he had no such emotional baggage keeping him from catching the clue bus.

He approached the “Your Number’s Up” game booth. The bored attendant was flipping through the pages of a fat paperback and singing softly to herself, “… 'She left me on the boardwalk / With my head held in my hands...'

“I beg your pardon,” Iben interrupted, “but I have a question. Interestingly, someone just gave me a wind-up toy exactly like this.” He pointed to the polar bear. “Can you tell me where they come from and what’s the name of the tune they play?”

At first he thought she didn’t understand him because she just giggled girlishly and pushed her chin-length brown locks behind her ears. Iben realized he still wore his pop-eyed glasses, but when he removed them, the smile came off the young woman’s face as well. Here we go again, Iben thought, another pretty woman, one minute all smiles and eyelashes, the next grim and frankly accusatory. He figured Jack might have better luck in these transactions, except, of course, Jack would already be gone.

“Sorry about the glasses,” Iben said. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Iben Powned and I’m a writer and therefore just really curious about those tin toys you’re giving away.”

“We give away nothing,” she said. Her tone of voice seemed kind of familiar but the accent was one he couldn’t identify. “You pay your money; you take your chance.”

“I see, of course.” Iben ponied up the five-buck fee. “So you’ll answer my questions if I pay?” he asked rhetorically. “Fair enough. How do I play?”

“You press this button, here,” she said pointing to a big red button. “And your ping-pong balls pop out here,” she pointed at a plastic chute. “You get five balls with numbers on them. Then you have to pitch the ball into the dish with the same number on it to win.”

Iben pushed the button and a ball with the number 16 popped out. “So, can you—by the way, I didn’t catch your name—

“Ventral Pallidum,” she said. “Go ahead, toss the ball.”

To Iben’s surprise, the ball safely hit its mark. “That’s unusual. Is that Eastern European?”

“Keep playing or I’ll get in trouble.” She placed one of the toys in front of him, a brood hen in a nest filled with Easter eggs that hatched into bunny rabbits.

Iben pushed the button again, a ball with the number 23 popped out. He tossed, and made the shot.

“Keep your eyes on the prize,” she said in true carnival barker style “My name is Netherlandish,” she said. “I’m not from there, but one of the tin toys is made there.”

She put his second trophy on the counter, a rose bud that bloomed to reveal a dancing green caterpillar inside. “The others are made in different places. Now hurry up, push the button.”
The next ball was number 8. Iben tossed it gently into the number 8 dish. The toy was a teddy bear riding a black rocking horse.

“Really, tin toys, all different, made everywhere in the world all playing the same melody?” Iben asked.

“You don’t believe me? You want me to draw you a map?”

“Could you do that? See, I think these music boxes might have to do with something much more important—“

“Keep your eyes on the prize,” she barked out to the crowd. “Finish the game,” she commanded Iben.

He pushed the button again. 16 popped then plopped into the right dish. The prize toy was a pair of cupids, one black, the other white, with arrows aimed at each other as they winged their way around a golden sundial. He had the same success with the next ball, 4. She gave him the polar bear music box.

“Can you tell me where this one came from?”

“Do you want to purchase a bonus ball?

“Will I find out where the polar bear comes from?”

She held out her hand, and snapped her fingers impatiently as he dug in his pocket for cash. “Don’t waste my time,” she snapped.

Iben pushed the button. 42 popped up. The woman slid a piece of paper across the counter.

“This is where the bear comes from?” Iben asked.

“Put it away! They’re watching.”

Iben casually tucked the map into his pocket not sharing Ventral’s fears in the least. In fact he was feeling quite smug as he filled his backpack with the toys.

“I feel like Santa Claus with my bag of goodies,” he joked. Unlike handsome Jack, he’d faced the music and come away with at least five new clues plus a map of an island. He was in such a good mood, he even shared a conspiratorial wink with the canine worrywart who’d been tugging on his leash to leave for the last five minutes.

“Just a sec, doggy-o-mine. WWID?” he crowed, pitching the final ball. “Iben would score!”
The 42 ball headed home as if pulled by a magnet. “I am the man!” Iben whooped as the ball fell into the dish. Instantly all the toys sprang to musical life, DO DO DO DO DOO DO, the yellow prize-booth lights shimmered then turned an eerie purple, he could see Ventral Pallidum’s teeth glowing in the weird light. Was she giving him the thumbs up, or signaling him to lift his eyes skyward? He looked up, nothing, then another sound brought him back to earth, an urgent beep, beep, beep. The sawdust beneath his feet began to shudder under the weight of a grinding, clunking mechanical beast crashing through the screaming, fleeing carnival crowd, and straight toward Iben.

Chapter Four: Reaching Out

2007-01-26T21:28:00.005-08:00

If this were a book, thought Iben, I’d have time to consider how incredibly surreal this is. The situation of a metallic beast bearing down on him while in the center of the midway in a carnival named after a Polish mathematician seemed somehow one that only Tristan Tzara could truly appreciate. But, in fact, the huge dark-green words REDI-MIX and REDI-CRETE were coming at him too fast to really contemplate. Iben did what he always did in situations like this, he yelped like a schoolgirl and ran. He didn’t even bother looking back to see the crash. He hoped Ventril, the barker, was ok but knew instinctively that somehow she could take care of herself.

In the car Iben surveyed the cheap toys he’d won at the carnival. Brood hen nest, rose bud, bear and horse, pair of cupids, map. That damned monotonous melody kept inching its way back into his head. He picked up the polar bear music box and inspected it closely. Turning it over in his hand he revealed a strange legend embossed on the bottom of the box.

01010111011011110111001001010011011001010010000000
1000000111001001100101011100110111010000100000011
0110001100001010011100110010001010111011000010111
00100110010001110011

*****

0110100001100001010011100110010001101100011001010
111001100100000010101000110100001100101001000000
1110010011001010110111001110100

What the hell is this? Iben thought, Morse code? He looked at the map and noticed the words “Satellite Interference” printed on it and thought the entire image looked rather like the head of a clown to him. Jeez, like I need more mystery. What I really need is to get home and make a call.

As he pulled up to his apartment building he noticed that the super had already replaced the broken glass in his window with a piece of plywood.

“They’re upstairs waiting for you, Mr. Powned,” said Jensen, the doorman whispered, tilting his head to toward the NYPD squad car parked in front of the fire hydrant.

“Thanks, Jensen,” he said to the doorman.

Sure enough, when Iben exited the elevator on his floor, a policeman was standing in front of his apartment door. “Weigh too many doughnuts,” Iben thought, chuckling at his own wit as he approached his front door

“Can I help you, officer? he said to the rather rotund beat cop.

“You Iben Powned?” He pronounced it “I been pound.”

Iben ignored the mispronunciation.

“Yes sir”

“Officer Ovular. I’d like to ask you a few questions ‘bout the bullet holes in your window. Gotta minute?” he said, inviting Iben into his own home.

The other officer seemed to be enjoying himself ransacking through Iben’s belongings inside the apartment. He gave them both a sheepish grin as Iben and Ovular entered the room.

“My partner, Grillo,” Ovular said. The other policeman nodded. Iben looked at him accusingly hoping he’d get the hint and stop rifling through his stuff. “The super let us in. Potential crime scene,” he said in explanation.

“Any idea who did this, Powned?” Ovular took out a small pad and pen, flipped the cover, wrote for a second and said, “You got any enemies, Powned? Somebody holdin’ a grudge or somebody that don’t like you?”

“No, officer, I believe it was probably a stray bullet,” said Iben as he began picking up the books that Grillo had tossed to the floor.

“Now if you don’t mind, I really have some cleaning up to do. Thank you!”

Ovular and Grillo didn’t offer to help, but they didn’t try to stop him, either.

“Let us know if you remember anything else,” replied Grillo as they left the apartment.

Iben released a deep sigh of relief and went immediately to the phone. As it was ringing, he pulled out his laptop, logged in and began typing in the numbers from the bottom of the music box.

“Hello? Professor Candace Apollo’s office.”

“Candy? Thank god you’re in. Look, I’ve just sent over a very strange e-mail. Do you think you can you tell me what it is?”

Candy Apollo was Iben’s only real friend and while they had met a few times in real life they had spent the majority of their relationship getting to know one another via e-mail. Apollo was a professor of Romantic Studies and Literature at NYU but, quite frankly, she was the smartest person Iben had ever met. Despite her occupation she was well versed in almost every field he could care to name. She knew that Iben used her to further his writing career but she liked the idea of being friends with a TV writer since she was a closet pop-culture junkie herself.
After a few moments of silence, in which Candy received and read the e-mail, she said, “It’s a positional numbering system, Iben.”

“A what?” he countered.

“It’s binary. You know; on and off, zero and one, binary! The language of computers.”

“What’s it say?”

“Ah, let me run it through a translator… One second. Ok. The first line of code reads, “worse rest landwards.” The “W” and “S” in “worse”, the “T” in “rest” and the “N” in “landwards” are all capitalized.” The second line reads, “handles the rent.” The “N” in “handles” and the “T” in “The” are capitalized.

“That makes no sense to me. You have any idea what it means?”

“No, not really. Give me a few minutes though, and I’ll see what I can come up with. I’ll call you right back.’

“Thanks, Candy. I’ll be here.”

He hung up the phone and returned to alphabetizing his trashed bookshelf until the dog’s whining, sniffing and scratching at the couch pillows drove him so crazy he had to ask, “What is it, boy? Lose your squeaky cheeseburger?”

The dog yipped encouragingly, and Iben lifted the corner of the sofa allowing the dog to capture it’s prize, which wasn’t a chew toy at all but a very old leather case bound by a braided leather strap. He unwound the band and found that the leather case protected a number of pages made from vellum parchment foolscap. The paper was fragile and stiff and covered in an elegant calligraphy. Iben leaned back into the crook of the sofa and began to read:

The Black Rock Sea Trader

Which e’er way the wind turns
My son, you first must learn
Of a dangerous realm called the sea…

The seven seas they’re unkind
And they’ll leave you behind
That’s the future that fate kept for me…

It was said Magnus alone
Could’ve killed Davy Jones
With a steely look or a frown…

Four score odd the crew,
Filled with gold it is true,
To Portsmouth forever now bound…

At the New World quay
Twenty-three vacant each day
‘Cept for grieving wives, sons and daughters…

No one’s ever claimed
Or were found the remains
Nor precious metals to fill up the coffers…

O’er ancient whale roads
That entwine the whole globe
And along the trade winds of wrath…

The ocean, it’s said,
Never speaks of the dead
When the cold winds of winter tack back…

The first mate made rounds
And the rigging odd sounds
As great waves broke o’er the railing…

And every man knew,
As Magnus did, too,
That the hull of the Black Rock was failing…

When the storm came a stealing
With every man reeling
Came the wreck of the ship the Black Rock…

Then the gales came a slashing
And the lightening flashing
Never again to find New World dock…

Where lies this man brave
Lost in some watery grave
As the mariners all know so well…

That a ship filled with gold
Or slaves ever so bold
Is destined to run ‘ground in hell…

Their fate remains lost
Their lives an uncommon cost
And the widow’s pine, wasting their prime…

In Portsmouth they prayed
Over every bare grave
And the church bells chimed forty odd times…

Now here is the mystery
That’s hidden from history
The ship found a tropical land…

A mysterious place
That rose out of the waves
A place touched by the almighty’s hand…

Which e’er way the wind turns
My son, first you must learn
Of a dangerous realm called the sea…

The seven seas they’re unkind
And they’ll leave you behind
That’s the future that fate kept for me…

The phone rang startling Iben from the poem.

“Hello?”

“Iben, it’s Candy. Ever seen “The Da Vinci Code?”

“Yeah.”

“You know the part where the old man does all the strange things to himself in the Louvre before he dies? He leaves Fibonacci numbers, anagrams and symbols?”

“Yeah, but what does that have to do with positional numbering systems?” he said sarcastically.

“The binary string and the encoded messages are anagrams for “New World Sea Traders” and “The Netherlands.” Apparently it’s the name of the company and the place where the music box was produced.”

“New World Sea Traders? I was just reading a poem about a trading ship called the Black Rock. They mention a place called the New World Dock. Do you think there is any connection?”

“I’m not sure, Iben, but I can look into it for you.”

“Yeah, no rush but if you find anything let me know. In the mean time I’ll do some research on my own. Thanks Candy.”

“No problem. Later.”

“Bye.”

Iben hung up and went back to the sheaf of parchment. There were about twenty pages and each one was printed in an elegant hand. The calligraphy was beautiful, he thought, but who wrote them and why? He thumbed through the titles. “Persephone’s Bees”, “Malik, The Ironman”, “Confections of Apollo”, “Alvar”, “Purgatory”, “Let Your Compass Guide You” and “Retrievers of Truth.” Hmm… interesting titles, he thought. He pulled another poem from the stack. Let’s see what this one is about.

Alvar

Down through the slick corridors of concealment
Suppressing the stark light
The keeping of mysteries can mire
The noblest of objectives in eclipse

To this shadow we fell prey

This, our aspiration then
To deliver and bestow new life to
A dying land and a failing people

Lucidity and control
Will guide us into a new light
To rescue humankind
We need first tap into our humanity.

A worldwide movement
Set against the dark regime
To provide us another chance,
To build a better future,
To further our expectations and
Sustain, enhance, and support us
All on an island of serenity and joy.

Namaste

On the back of the parchment was written:
“Since the dawn of time man has been curious. Imagining all that is possible. Reaching out to a better tomorrow. Discover the experience for yourself.”
The Hanso Foundation - Copenhagen

It looks like I’m traveling to Copenhagen. I hope my passport is current, he thought as he descended into oblivion…

Chapter Five: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

2007-01-26T21:28:00.004-08:00

The eye was almost out of sight and Kochanie was getting very worried.

“Giddy up, Rosie,” the girl urged until her father shushed her.

“You are very young, my child, always in a hurry to get to your destination. Black Rose is very old, so she can only try to get there alive.”

Kochanie strained to see the outlines of the All-Seeing Oracular Oracle sign painted on Dr. Apollo’s wagon as it faded into the sunset. She knew that her father was a proud man, and despite the Nazi war that had driven them out of their Polish home and kept them constantly on the move, he’d never abandoned the promise he’d made his wife’s father, Malik Benoffski, to keep the family circus intact.

Kochanie also knew that the Nazis said all circus people were gypsies who should be eradicated from the face of the earth. And although Kochanie did not remember her grandfather who’d died before she was born, she would never forgot the night those murdering thugs had invaded their encampment, forcing everyone to hide in the forest lest they be swept away to concentration camps.

Finding no human prisoners, the Nazis had broken into the animal cages, allowing most of the horses, cows and bears to escape, but they slaughtered her beloved Iorek Byrnison the Dancing Polar Bear as he fought to protect his mate and two cubs, which never were found, dead or alive.
That night had shown Kochanie many terrible things, but the lesson she learned was that it was dangerous to stick out from the crowd. Plain was better. Vanilla did not draw the wrong kind of attention. There was safety in fading into the background crowd and danger in drawing attention to oneself. Hide in a crowd; avoid getting caught all alone on a lonely stretch of road.
Suddenly, the night sky erupted in explosions, but these weren’t bombs, they were beautiful flowers blooming among the stars.

“See, sweetness, you were worried for nothing,” her father said. “Those are bouquets of welcome sent to us from the Tivoli Gardens. Some say it’s the happiest place on earth, and it’s going to be our new home”

And she had been as happy at that magical place as she’d ever been because it was always crowded with people, mostly the same people day after day, but who were all different in sometimes very exotic and even alarming ways. It was the one place where a small girl with some big differences of her own would have to compete for attention, which was something she declined to pursue. She tried to be proud of her heritage, as her father insisted she should be, but when outsiders pointed and crowds gathered to laugh or cringe at her and her mother, she only felt so deathly afraid that one day she just couldn’t go on with the show.

Her father had been very angry and her mother told her how ashamed she was that she disrespected family and herself, so Kochanie ran away. She ran all the way to the ocean where she finally collapsed, sobbing on the sand beside the statue of The Little Mermaid. She sat watching the guardian swans, one white and one black, protecting the Mermaid’s rocky perch, and wept to think how alone she would always be just like this stone statue.

“Do you know her story?” He was an older man, older than Papa. He wore neatly trimmed black whiskers tucked into his thick overcoat and had a white dog by his side. Kochanie wondered if he was a policeman.

“Some people think it’s a sad story, but I don’t know if that’s true. That Little Mermaid was a survivor,” he said in a quiet voice.

“I thought she died, after she couldn’t kill the prince, she threw herself into the ocean and turned to foam,” Kochanie said.

“That’s right, but there was a loophole her grandmother didn’t know about. Instead of dying, she turned into a spirit, a daughter of the air. As one of them, she can earn her own soul by doing good deeds. When 300 years have passed she will have earned her soul and will rise into the kingdom of God,” the whiskered man said. “And you’re helping her, did you know that?”
Kochanie shook her head.

“With each good child she finds she subtracts a year, while she adds a day for each tear she must shed over a wicked child. Look at her, she’s not crying is she? That must mean that she knows you are sorry for whatever grief or trouble has led to your tears. You are a good girl,” he said.

“You will be better still when you are able to apologize to your parents for making them worry about where you’ve run off to. Am I right?”

Kochanie nodded.

“Will you allow my wife and myself and, of course, my shaggy companion Tarleton, to offer you a ride home?”

He led her to a chauffeur-driven Duisenberg automobile where his elegantly dressed wife slid over to make room for her.

“Can we hurry?” Kochanie begged, the car sped toward the amusement park, but the time they reached Tivoli, it was too late to make amends. The circus wagons had vanished along with Dr. Apollo, old black Rose, her parents and her twin brother, the tall, strong able boy who kept her safe from harm.

On that fateful day in 1943, Nazi sympathizers had burned down the Tivoli Garden and the people who had been performing at the time vanished along with the black smoke.
Kochanie had gone home with the rich people, who promised that they would help find her family, but until then they thought perhaps she’d find some comfort in a cup of hot cocoa, a slice of buttered toast, and the warmth of a down quilt covering the first bed she’d ever slept in that stayed in one place all night long.

******

“Excuse me, Professor Apollo,” the steward said, reaching across her seat to pull up the window shade and allow in a dark arctic dawn

“We’ll be arriving in Copenhagen in approximately 23 minutes. May I bring you something, toast, coffee, tea…”

“Do you have any cocoa on board, Scott?”

“It’s Steve, Professor,” he said, smiling indulgently, “and yes we do have hot chocolate, Dutch style.

“Thank you, Steve. Please forgive my eroding memory,”

“Don’t worry, it happens all the time,” he said.

“Old age,” she said by way of excusing her mistake. “By the way, I think you’d better bring a cup of something for my sleepy friend. Won’t he be happy to know he’s made it here alive?”
Iben woke up and smelled the coffee. Since Diet Coke was Iben’s usual morning eye opener, having long ago surrendered the complexities of the coffee maker to the pros at Starbucks, French Roast was his first clue that he was not at home on his couch having fallen asleep reading an old poem about a boat.

How he’d got from there to a place that he quickly surmised must be airborne was a blank. Where was he headed? Destination unknown, and that was a place Iben was almost certain he did not want to visit. In fact, he was pretty panicky by the time his Professor Apollo took the seat next to him.

“I’ve asked the steward to bring some schnapps,” Candace reported. “I thought it might help revive you, but I see you’ve come alive on your own. Mr. McIntyre said that’s what would happen.”

“Professor Apollo?” Iben’s brain scrambled to comprehend her presence.

“Can you speak?” she inquired, peering at him over the half-moon crescents of her reading spectacles.

“Woof!”

Iben squinted into the darkness.

“Good boy,” she said. “I didn’t know you had a dog, Iben. Mr. McIntyre said you wouldn’t leave town without him so ABC arranged to have him travel as your helper dog; canine companion. They said your therapist insisted.”

“They?”

“Mr. McIntyre, that is, Hamish, said everything was arranged through them: private jet, limo, hotel rooms. Actually, a three-bedroom suite,” she said the last bit with a kind of bemused wonder. “The dog has his own room.”

“Hamish?” Iben said. “You know Hamish?”

Dr. Apollo laughed. “He said you’d probably be pretty fuzzy about the details when you finally woke up. I had no idea you were so afraid of flying— although perhaps I shouldn’t mention that until we’re on the ground. Anyway, you’re right, I didn’t know Hamish until he called me yesterday to say that you had a writing assignment for ABC - which, by the way, I now understand was the source of all that encryption -- requiring you to fly to Denmark for a few days, but that you were going to lose the job because of your fear of flying.

“He said he had some tranquilizer pills that would get you through the flight, but you couldn’t go alone. He understood I was a good friend of yours and if I could leave immediately, ABC would pay my way to accompany you,” she reported.

“‘All expenses paid’? You know I’ve lived quite awhile and it’s been a long time since anyone said those three words to me. Let me thank you, Iben, for making this trip possible. It’s quite an unexpected Christmas gift.”

****

“What did one snowman say to the other snowman?”

Iben considered the question. Was it a riddle? He hated riddles, but since Dr. Apollo had risked her life for him, albeit unwittingly, he felt obliged to make an effort for her.

“Are we in heaven or did hell just freeze over?” was Iben’s best guess, as he stuffed his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets and contemplated the dazzle of a million fairy lights shimmering off the swirl of a trillion snowflakes reflected darkly in his old friend’s mica-bright eyes.

He figured that was not the answer she was looking for but then he didn’t think he had a snowman’s chance in hell of answering even one of the other questions on Dr. Apollo’s list that grew longer and more perplexing with each loop they made around the amusement park.

It was all snow, all Santa Claus, all twinkle lights all the time plus they’d taken in the pantomime show (clown mimes, no lie) and visited the aquarium. They’d boarded the landlocked frigate, bought smiley faced balloons from a Keystone Kop clown who reminded Iben of…who? Oh, yeah, officer Grillo with a greasepaint grin replacing that NYPD sneer.

All the while Dr. Apollo added more and more questions about Lost, The Lost Experience, which Iben hadn’t even heard of until today, and ideas for the plot of the Apocalypse Equation. These were questions so impossible to consider given his trembling state of mind that finally her voice mixed with the whitewash of the snow to become a kind of tabula rasa on which he imprinted the litany of worries that he could not convince her were real.

Between the time they’d landed in Copenhagen and arrived at the Tivoli Gardens, Iben had unwrapped that special gift Dr. Apollo had so profusely thanked him for exposing the lump of coal it contained. He’d told her about the turkey shoot at his apartment on Thanksgiving, the open grave in New Jersey, the mechanical toys, the weird tune, the purple light, The Black Rock poem and he flat out stated that he feared Hamish was in cahoots with the people who were apparently trying to kill him and now, regrettably, her, too.
She had just clucked her tongue in a rather dismissive “tsk tsk,” and said she was glad they’d landed in Copenhagen instead of crashing on some untraceable desert isle.

“Finally, Iben, here’s your vindication for all of the dreary years of novelizing! Enjoy yourself. And get a load of this snow,” she said, holding out mittened hands. “It’s gossamer; the cotton-candy of frozen precipitate.”

Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? Unfortunately, Iben did not. It reminded him of a substance equally ethereal, but far less benign. With a shudder, he wondered if nanobots came in white?
“Come on, what did one snowman say to the other snowman?”

“I don’t know.” Iben really didn’t want to play this game any more. “You can’t get here from there?” he offered, reluctantly.

“Isn’t life a ball?”

Even standing here in the middle of Santa’s friggin’ winter wonderland, Iben thought he could detect a faint tick-tick-tick coming from this super-duper Christmas gift. He didn’t want to shake it, didn’t dare peek inside, he just wanted to leave it under the tree, take a cab to the airport, fly home and forget the whole thing.

“Let’s go home,” Iben said.

Dr. Apollo and the dog turned to face him, their eyes filled with sympathy. “You’re afraid,” she said.

“Afraid? What? Me, afraid?” Iben parried.

“You’re afraid of success. This is the job you’ve been waiting to come your way for years. Now it’s here. You’re this close. And suddenly you’re a homesick kid at sleep-away camp; a great big quivering blob of writer’s block, sobbing into your sad little pillow on the scary top bunk.”
“What about the nanobots and the cement truck and the weird music and the big clown face and the bullet,” Iben pantomimed (while using words, which technically was a cheat) his many close calls to emphasize his very real and legitimate fears. “Knock-out drugs. Explain that if you can. I am not afraid of words. Words are my life.”

“Exactly. Your life blood. So, how much of that vital fluid have you pumped into the Apocalypse Equation?”

“Who has time to write? I’m constantly on the run. Even when I’m unconscious, I’m in transit.”
“And now you’re ready to do some more traveling? Ready to get back on that plane and waste another day or two? You won’t be happy until you lose this job, will you?”

Iben shuffled his feet. She could be very persuasive. He acknowledged that failure was a hard habit to break.

“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to sit down in one of these charming cafes. You’ll get out your laptop. I’ll dig through all those these documents ABC messengered over to you on Thanksgiving,” she said.

“You mean that girl with sunglasses? She was a messenger?” Iben tried to remember the details of that fateful encounter. “Then why did somebody take a shot at her?”

“I can’t tell you that, but whoever that someone was, they missed. Thank goodness,” she said with the same gentle patience that a mom would use as she checked under her kid’s bed for giant spiders. The way the doctor at the Santa Rosa Hospital told Hurley that his friend Dave was, you know, pretend.

“There are no guns at Tivoli Gardens,” she reassured him. “And I know for a fact that it’s the second or third happiest place on earth. This way,” she said, steering him into the Nissekøbing’s miniature world of pixies and gnomes brought to life by thousands of mechanical puppets.

“So, why did they send you to Copenhagen? To Tivoli Gardens?” she tapped her glasses against her cheek, oblivious to the clockwork universe they were wandering through. “As we’ve seen, the Tivoli has much in common with the Lost island. It has an aquarium, for example, and an old fashioned frigate like the one in the show, The Black Rock. I think there might be something there to work with plot wise.” Iben thought he could hear the gears of her great big brain whirring in time with the tiny mechanical marvels building pixie-sized cabins, baking elfin loaves of bread, playing gnomish chess.

“And from all that stuff I read on the plane trip over, Copenhagen is where the Hanso Foundation headquarters is located,” she continued, indefatigably, but losing Iben whose attention had been drawn to the scene of pixie circus. It was far more detailed than most of the other tableau offering clowns that juggled, a big top going up, colorful painted wagons, including one that featured a huge eye advertising the talents of the mysterious soothsayer to be found inside. There were a troupe of circus-roadie type gnomes going about the business of running a traveling show and right at the edge of the action there was a child pixie, tinier in every way than the others, but as exquisitely wrought as a MacFarland action figure. Except, that is, for the hand, oddly ill-defined, that cranked the old fashioned hurdy-gurdy.

“Dr. Apollo, check this out,” Iben said, interrupting her oral storyboarding.

“These are delightful objects aren’t they,” she said, without stopping to look.

“No, I mean it. This pixie circus is incredible…” but that moment the hurdy-gurdy girl’s instrument began to play--Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do—stopping Iben in his tracks.

“Do you hear that, Dr. Apollo? That’s the music. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s the song all those music boxes play.”

Then what to Iben’s wondering eyes should appear but a polar bear that began to dance to the tiny child’s tune.

“Oh my god, it’s the same polar bear! It’s gotta be,” he said, his imagination captivated by the coincidence. “I told you so. Ha! Look at that! I am not crazy.” Iben said, clapping his mittens together to create a one-man standing ovation.

“What do you say to that, Dr. Apollo? Seeing is believing, isn’t it?” he said, and then immediately had occasion to ask himself the same question when he turned to face his friend who was nowhere in sight.

Chapter Six: Stranger in a Strange Land

2007-01-26T21:28:00.003-08:00

Pure as the driven snow. It had been many years since Søren Nørgård had heard that old-fashioned expression, but remembering it now, he realized he’d always misunderstood its meaning. Having lived his whole life in snow-laced Copenhagen, he’d thought that being compared to the pristine beauty of newly fallen snow was a compliment to ones moral character. Since he’d taken up this graveyard-shift vigil he’d had a lot of time to think about morality, character, and purity of snow. He’d seen plenty of it fall and fade to grey as he stood waiting in the shadows night after nightmare in rain, sleet, hail and, yes, of course, snow and then more snow.

He’d stood so still for so long, the eye of his own silent ice storm, that the cop on the beat, the bartender down the street and the nurse who always took the same five a.m. bus had started calling him the Snowman. Søren didn’t mind. He thought the name fit: he was frozen to this spot, waiting for an answer, a sign, a ray of hope that would allow him to melt away, move on.

Meanwhile, Søren had plenty of time to reconsider many of his previous assumptions about the facts of life and one of the conclusions that he’d come to was that driven snow was not pure. That was just an optical illusion, snow blindness. It was a whitewash that hid a multitude of sins; out of sight, out of mind. Unless, that is, you had eyes made out of coal, then you could see right through the pretty white lie down to the blast shattered windows and blackened ledges beneath the frothy icing. The snowman would never forget what happened in there, and he had the right eyes, black-ringed, unblinking, to seek the truth of what happened the night of October 6, 2006, on the ninth floor of Ørsund Klengvjel 544, Copenhagen, Denmark, home of The Hanso Foundation.

* * * *

Nørgård had been working NATO S.W.A.T. for almost eight years and in that time he had only fired his weapon once three months ago. Soon after the incident, it was established that the bullet that had killed the terrorist had not been fired from his assault rifle. So he’d been spared the Internal Affairs battery of inquiries and psychological testing issues. His teammate had not been as lucky. He was still mired in paperwork, tests and inquiries after three months until his death put paid to all his outstanding debts.

While that earlier assignment had been very tough, the current mission was beginning to look even more challenging. Their orders were so vague and the mission prepared so quickly he worried that major details had been missed. He was very proud to be serving in his hometown for the first time having spent the bulk of his career any and everywhere else around on earth, but there was a surreal quality to this operation that troubled him and made him wish it wasn’t taking place so close to home. There just wasn’t as much intelligence available as in previous assignments. It felt much too rushed for his liking. All that aside, when his superiors ordered him to jump he was expected to read their minds and jump a meter higher than they anticipated.

For this operation Nørgård was assigned sniper position on a building across the street from the prime target. His responsibility was to provide covering fire if needed and to monitor the insertion team on his communication gear. He looked at the building through his night-vision scope and followed the progress of the rest of his team as they reported to the command leader.

Søren heard the team lead, designated “Alpha,” ask for a situation report from the rest of the squad through the ever-present light static of his communication gear. He focused in on and then calculated the distance to the building across the street with his scope and night-vision goggles.

“All units report!” Alpha leader commanded.

Søren spoke into the microphone of his communication headset, “Charlie team, eyes on!”

“Zulu team, in position.”

“Bravo team, lobby secure.”

“You have visual on target?” the team leader asked.

“Yes sir, heat trails on tenth floor!” responded Søren.

“Is that confirmed?” Alpha demanded.

“Yes sir, it’s a mint-green lab coat and a black ponytail,” replied Bravo.

“Lunatics and their hair!” the leader replied with disgust.

Nørgård chuckled. The S.W.A.T. team members all wore their hair regulation military short. So everyone with hair longer than two centimeters was labeled a lunatic.

“Ninth floor now,” said the Bravo team leader. The slight change in Bravo leader’s breathing over the communication gear told Søren that Bravo and his team had just jogged up eight flights of stairs.

“Target is confirmed on tenth floor.”

“Bravo here, look’s like we’ve got a staircase between lab levels nine and ten.”

“Personnel count on nine?” Alpha leader inquired.

“Alpha, we count three. No, four.”

“Armed?”

“Affirmative! Target moving towards the elevators!”

Søren knew that for the insertion team this was the most tense and stressful moment of the assignment. Just before the first strike there came a split-second of moral philosophizing that no S.W.A.T. member ever wanted to admit to but everyone knew was present. Do I have the right to kill? But his training took over and the fleeting thought disappeared. They all knew what they had signed up for and what had to be done. Besides, when bullets were flying there was no time to debate what was right.

“Bravo, this is Alpha, we’re on the move!”

“Alpha, this is Bravo, we’ve been made!”

“Zulu, cut power now,” demanded the Alpha leader.

“Cutting!” she said.

“Bravo, take nine. We’ve got ten. Zulu stand ready to support covering fire.”

“All teams, go! Go! Go!”

Nørgård could hear voices calling and yelling in the background and he knew that they did not belong to his team.

“Zulu, did you cut power?” Bravo questioned.

“Affirmative”

“Then why are we seeing lights?”

“They’ve got auxiliary!”

“Freeze!!” bellowed Bravo leader.

Søren heard the “pop – pop” of a handgun and then the unmistakable sound of the
gas-operated SIG 551 Sturmgewehr assault rifle his team employed. The sound of at least two three- or four-second bursts of automatic fire filtered through his headpiece. A mixture of raised voices and shuffling feet could also be heard. The words, “Freeze, get down, freeze!” were heard often but in the confusion he could not tell who yelled what.

“Alpha leader, behind you, behind you!”

“I see him, south corridor.”

“Nine clear. I’ve got him cornered in an office. He’s barricaded,” reported Bravo leader.

“We need a ram up here.”

Nørgård heard the distinct sound of a twenty-six pound Zak door ram slamming against a door and the door crashing in.

“Hands behind your back, knees to the floor,” roared Alpha leader.

“We’ve got him!” exclaimed Zulu leader.

The Bravo team leader responded, “No that’s not Mittelwerk. He’s a look alike. Repeat, our target’s still loose.”

“Where is he?”

There is nothing more sobering, thought Søren Nørgård, then the sound of a calm voice amidst the turmoil of a S.W.A.T. raid. But the baritone with the accent that came over the communicator was no voice he recognized.

“Gentlemen, I’m sorry to have to do this…”

“We’ve got a radio over here,” reported Bravo leader.

The voice over the radio continued, “I can’t have my work compromised. You should run now!”

“Shit, this whole place is wired,” cried Alpha leader, “Go! Go! Abort! Abort! Evac now!”

Søren heard his team member’s boots pounding down the stairwell racing to beat the bomb, but never took his eye from the scope, methodically scanning the ninth floor windows searching for the man with his finger on the come-to-Jesus trigger. He didn’t need a clear shot; he’d go with the shadow of a doubt, a ghost of a chance, the twinkle of an eye.

“Namaste!” Nørgård heard the pitiless voice of the Hanso Foundation sign off just as
his scope found the flicker of light in a ninth floor window. He steadied his aim at the match-head target and pulled the trigger, but it was too little, too late. He felt, rather than heard, the “fwoomp” of the concussion seconds before a conflagration of heat and flame erupted through the windows of the ninth and tenth floors of the building showering the street below with shredded glass and burning debris.

When the sound of the explosion diminished the only remaining thing Søren could hear was the eerie static drone coming from his dead radio…but it was telling him more than words ever could. He knew that Alpha team was gone, and in a way the blast had taken his life, too. He knew that if it took the rest of his days, cost him his happiness, his hope, his life, he now had a new mission: to find out why Alpha team had to die and make sure their killer would not find cold comfort by taking cover beneath a blanket of all-forgiving snow.

****

Søren had been staked out at the scene of the crime for nearly three months. During that time he’d come to know exactly how the street ticked, who came, who went, what they drove, where they parked. That’s why he moved a little deeper into the shadows when he saw an unfamiliar unmarked police car pull into the alley beside number 544, kill the ignition and lights.

“Looks like my Christmas present has arrived a few days early this year,” Søren thought. “All right, then let’s see what kind of surprise Santa has brought me.”

****

Michael Valentine Smith had nothing on Iben Powned today. The culture and language in Copenhagen could have been Martian as far as Iben was concerned. He understood none of it. Standing in the Tivoli plaza he attempted to formulate a plan of action. Unfortunately, that plan consisted of staring blankly out at the passing scene and in at a mind empty of rational thought. Fear of being stranded in a strange land would not seem like the usual neurosis of a been-there done-that New Yorker, but Iben didn’t really care to do new things or meet new people and he had no idea what he was going to do next.

Iben had always thought he understood the meaning of loneliness. It seemed a permanent condition of his reality and his life. Oh, he had friends and plenty of acquaintances but there were times, especially during the holidays that he felt very much alone. However, being abandoned in a foreign city with no currency and no guide and no idea how to get back to the safety of his hotel left him feeling extremely vulnerable and not a little frightened. “Now what?” he thought.

Iben glanced around the plaza and realized that there were a number of young people milling about. He tried to recall his conversation with Dr. Apollo and any information concerning the three-bedroom suite at the luxury hotel she never named. The only other thought that kept circling back to him was that The Hanso Foundation world headquarters building was located somewhere in the city. So, Iben did what tourists from time immemorial have done. He asked a local resident for directions.

He drew near a young man in a long brown coat and asked, “Excuse me sir, can you point me to The Hanso Foundation?”

“Sorry, never heard of it!” the man replied in perfect English.

Iben next approached a young woman dressed in jeans and a heavy coat. Her fashionable black glasses with embedded diamonds.

“The Hanso Foundation?” he asked.

“Hanso? Yah, Ørsund Klengvjel 544,” she replied pointing into the distance.

Iben headed away from the Tivoli plaza towards the canal in the general direction of Nørrebor. Along the way he asked a number of people directions for Ørsund Klengvjel. After an hour of begging directions from perfect strangers Iben came out on a quiet, unpopulated street.

The Hanso Foundation building was of a typical minimalist modern design. It had been constructed of glass and concrete with the occasional piece of aluminum trim. The thing that stood out to Iben however, was not the design but the blackened and burned shell of the ninth and tenth floors of the building. Glass windows had obviously been blasted out and all the openings were scorched as if from the inside. The front doors were covered over with pressboard and the building looked deserted.

It was obvious to Iben that an intense explosion had occurred here, and not too long ago since by the look of things of the clean-up operation was far from finished. The sign in front of the building, complete with logo and name, was dark and exhibited signs of scorching but it still told Iben everything he needed to know. Hanso was no more at this address. It occurred to Iben that for the second time that day he had no idea where to turn next.

A thin, middle-aged man dressed in a crumpled dark suit emerged from a doorway, flashed a badge at Iben and said, “Please sir, to come with me…” The man took him by the elbow and gently directed him towards a police car parked in a nearby alley.

“Great, more cops!” Iben thought. “Certainly!” he told the policeman. “Where else do I have to go?” he said mostly to his sad self.

The policeman got into the back seat of the squad car with Iben. “Headquarters,” he instructed the driver. When they were settled in he introduced himself.

“My name is Aarøn Alvarsen St. Germaine and I am the arson detective assigned to The Hanso Foundation case. You’ve seen the destruction, yes?”

When Iben attempted to answer, the officer stopped him.

“Rhetorical question,” he said. “We know who you are Mr. Powned. We just don’t know what you are doing here. Would you care to enlighten us as to what an American journalist is doing in Copenhagen and why you are interested in The Hanso Foundation?”

“I’m here doing research for a T.V. program,” Iben replied defensively, “I’m not a journalist. I write scripts.”

“Yes, well, scripts or newspapers… they are both, after all, just fiction, no? In your ‘research’ travels have you ever heard the term Dharma Initiative?”

“I can’t say I have,” he lied.

“At the risk of calling you a liar, I find that difficult to believe given the nature of your assignment. But you are a stranger here and we Danish are nothing if not polite to visitors to our island nation. Therefore, I’ll take you at your word and once we arrive at headquarters will find a way to enlighten you,” he said cryptically.

When they reached the police station, St. Germaine exited the car, scanned the immediate area before quickly pulling Iben from the vehicle. He did not see Søren Nørgård watching them from the building across the street. “This way,” he said and led Iben inside the station, down a short hallway, and into a dark interrogation room.

“Make yourself comfortable,” St. Germaine said to Iben, and then nodded to his own reflection in the one-way glass at the back of the room as an 8mm film began to roll.
Black-and-white still images began to crawl across the blank white wall of the room.

The words “Orientation Testing Issue 1980” flashed across the screen in bright red letters and for the next six minutes Iben watched as a number of images quickly flashed across the wall. There were too many to remember them all but he did manage to commit several to memory.

Each image appeared to be a one-of-a-kind photograph, but no two images were related. They didn’t appear to be in any sequence. He remembered a nuclear mushroom cloud and immediately thought “Bikini Atoll”, he saw a small weather balloon, a Rorschach test page which resembled a human pelvis, the “light” side of the moon, a Mapinguari or Megatherum, a swimming nurse shark, an antenna array, two perfectly white swans on a body of water, an adult polar bear tagged with a tracking device with two cubs (a scientist appeared to be taking notes), a Doctor and what looked like a burn victim in a Nazi soldier’s uniform, an image of burned or melted film stock, an aerial or satellite view of Area 51, a light dispersion pattern, a wild boar, a pulsar, a close-up of in-vitro fertilization, the Aurora Borealis, another mushroom cloud that may have been the detonation over Hiroshima, an enlarged image of an atom and the Dharma wheel. There were many other images but Iben’s memory of them was quickly fading. The ominous questions, “Where did they go? Why didn't they return? Whatever happened to the Dharma Initiative?” appeared on the wall. The words flickered obliquely on the wall and then faded.

“What is all this about?” Iben asked.

“Isn’t this why you came to Copenhagen, Mr. Powned, for research purposes?” replied St. Germaine. “The film you have just watched is research of the most important kind! We believe that this film is somehow tied to the arson that occurred in October at The Hanso Foundation. We have witnesses that swear they saw armed men in military uniforms near the building just before the explosion. It’s almost as if someone with a great deal of knowledge concerning criminal investigations wiped the place clean before we got there.

“What was left of it,” Iben mentioned.

“To be sure, we gathered what evidence we could find but there was precious little.”

“But what does this film have to do with the arson or with me?” Iben asked.

“That’s what you’re going to tell us, Mr. Powned,” he replied.

****

After St. Germaine’s driver dropped him off at his hotel, Iben walked into the lobby and sat down. He needed to catch his breath, get his bearings, and sort out the past 24 hours.

“What just happened?” he asked himself. He recalled the film and he remembered St. Germaine talking about research but it occurred to Iben that a lot of unaccounted time had elapsed since he was picked up. Splintered images refracted through his mind but they made no sense and he realized he was suffering the second worst headache of his life. His cell phone rang disturbing him from his state of bewilderment.

Iben Powned,” he answered distractedly.

“Mr. Powned, I think we need to talk…”

It took him a moment to place the voice. It sounded very much like the messenger who had left her backpack in his apartment back in New York.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

Iben looked around the cavernous lobby of the five-star hotel bulging with bejeweled Christmas revelers, hand-holding honeymooners, elegant matrons perched on high-priced luggage sipping Aquavit with their equally high-priced escorts as a choir of tiny tin-foil-haloed angels spilled through the revolving door singing their little hearts out.

“Never been more alone in my life,” Iben confessed.

Chapter Seven: Subterranean Homesick Blues

2007-01-26T21:28:00.002-08:00

Never lonelier? Iben knew that was a bit of an overstatement. After all, he was an orphan, and not the middle-aged kind whose parents have lately passed on, or the self-selected type who reject their blood relatives as unacceptable, but the real deal, raised in an orphanage from birth until age twelve.

Then on his thirteenth birthday, without a word of warning, he was sent away from the only home he’d ever known and placed in a very well respected boarding school where his non-existent family ties made him even lonelier than his homesick classmates. During his tenure at St. Anthony’s, Iben had been taken under the wing of the headmaster and his wife, who grudgingly suggested he call her mom. He did so, but with even less conviction on his side. So, Iben knew from lonely, and yet he’d still have to say that tonight was somehow worse.

Beep. Beep.

“Hang on, I’ve got another call,” Iben put the first caller on hold.

“Iben Powned.”

“Iben? For christsake, where the hell are you?”

It was Hamish McIntyre.

“Denmark,” Iben replied coolly, while in fact feeling quite conflicted. Was Hamish, the purported mastermind of this European holiday, pretending he didn’t know Iben’s whereabouts or, scary thought, was it possible that Hamish had nothing to do with this trip? The way things had been going, Iben didn’t like the odds.

“Bloody hell, what are you doing in Denmark?” Hamish demanded. “You do realize that you’re on deadline for this ABC project. You remember it don’t you? The assignment that I worked my ass off to secure for you? Then without so much as a by your leave, you depart for Scandi-fucking-navia. You don’t call; you don’t write. You’re going to blow this off, aren’t you, you ungrateful sod.”

Unless Hamish was a way better actor than he was an agent, Iben was going with the imposter theory, and was about to tell Hamish his fantastic tale, when he saw Dr. Apollo enter the lobby with the Labrador retriever by her side. Even bathed in the hotel’s five-star golden glow, Iben could tell the day had taken a toll on the diminutive professor.

“Listen, Hamish, now’s not a good time. I’m going to call you back,” Iben switched back to his other call. “Still there?”

“I wouldn’t advise you to play games with me, Iben,” threatened the girl who he thought might be the Thanksgiving Day messenger.

“I don’t know any games,” Iben said. “At least not the kind you’re playing.”
“We have to meet,” she said. “The Viking Ship museum, ten a.m. tomorrow.”

“No,” Iben replied. “I don’t think I can make it.”

“I do,” said she who assumed she would be obeyed.

“I know you do, but you’re mistaken. All kinds of things have happened to me in the past few weeks. Things that have made me question my own sanity, risk my life, question the trust-worthiness of long-time friends and associates and put them in harm’s way. You know on Lost when Locke started punching in the numbers? For an entire season he was, like, totally caught up in the daft idea that feeble task was steeped in fated significance. Until the day he decided he’d been wrong. Then he stopped punching in the numbers and, you know what? Nothing much happened. The world didn’t end; nobody died. So, I’m going to take a lesson from his experience and put an end to what I’ve been going through before I waste a year of my life, destroy my already foundering career and lose the few friends I have. I’ve got a book to write. I’m on deadline. I wish you every success in your current endeavor, whatever it may be, but count me out.”

Iben ended the call just as the dog caught sight of him and steered Dr. Apollo through the holiday throng in his direction. Iben hurried to meet them, hoping that Dr. Apollo would not collapse before he could reach her. But as soon as she saw him, she cried out a welcome and seemed to gain a bit of strength.

“My dear boy, I feared the worse. If anything had happened to you, I’d never have forgiven myself.”

“Dr. Apollo, as much as I appreciate your concern, you need not feel responsible for my safety,” Iben replied, gently taking her arm. “I’m a big boy now. If anything, I was worried about you. I turned around and you were gone.”

“Oh, I know. How stupid of me,” she said, but she was clearly anxious, scanning the crowd nervously as though looking for new trouble to find them.

“What do you say we go up to the suite?” Iben recommended.

****

As soon as he’d looked into her weary eyes, Iben decided not to share his worries with her. Was it really important for her to know that Hamish hadn’t planned this trip, that the Hanso headquarters existed in real life, but was now a bombed out shell, and that he’d been taken to an unknown location by men claiming they were the police who then drugged or hypnotized him to get information he didn’t know he possessed? Heck no. He’d leave her in blissful ignorance, a state of innocence he wished he’d hung onto.

Once they reached the Kierkegaard Suite, Iben made sure that Dr. Apollo had everything she needed for a long winter’s nap: fire in the hearth, hot toddy by her bedside, dog curled protectively at her feet.

In the suite’s living room, a Christmas tree twinkled merrily beside the fireplace where a Yule log glowed. It crossed his mind that this was a rather more homey setting than he’d ever had on Christmas, but he figured if he fell under its spell, St. Nick would show up with a candy canes filled with sodium pentothal and a bag alive with an army of mechanical tin toys.

Iben just wanted to do something normal. What about The Valenzetti Equation: Numbers of Necromancy? Not only had he not written word one, he had no idea what he was going to write about. Research and development was the first order of business. He unpacked the documents and maps that had been in the messenger’s backpack, found his copy of the Gary Troup novel Bad Twin, got out his laptop and logged onto Lostpedia's Valenzetti equation entry:

“According to the 1975 orientation film in the Sri Lanka Video, the Valenzetti Equation “predicts the exact number of years and months until humanity extinguishes itself.” The numbers, 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42, are explained as the numerical values to the core environmental and human factors of the Valenzetti Equation. Alvar Hanso also states in the video that the purpose of the DHARMA Initiative is to change the numerical values of any one of the core factors in the equation in order to give humanity a chance to survive. However, Thomas Mittlewerk revealed that as of 2006, they have failed to change the values through manipulating the environment, as the equation continues to arrive at the same six numbers.”

It didn’t take Iben long to come to the conclusion that the Valenzetti Equation could be interpreted to mean just about anything his story required. At first this seemed like a very good thing, but after four hours of trying to come up with a story that would plausibly fit any interpretation of the Numbers of Necromancy, he realized there was such a thing as too much literary license. If he had no idea what the Valenzetti Equation was supposed to mean, what was he going to write about?

It took him another couple of hours research to decide that iron, as in the stuff dug out of deep holes in the ground, was a solid substance he could use as ballast for the ephemeral equation since, oddly enough, it came up frequently. Iben made a list:

On Lost , Michael promised to take Michael to the Flatiron building in New York,
In The Lost Experience Rachel Blake clocked Malik in the face with an iron, earning him the nickname Iron man; The Black Rock ship carried mining tools, most likely for gold mining, but, still… Magnetite, magnetic iron, is often called the black rock.

The fake Henry Gale had been in mining, albeit non-metallic ores.Historically, iron was called the holy metal because it was used to make swords during the crusades.Magnetite, the lodestone, was also used to make compasses, as in “Let Your Compass Be Your Guide,” from the Lost Experience,Magnetism and electromagnetic anomalies play an important plot point in Lost. The hatch was ground zero for the electromagnetic anomaly. In Celtic mythology, Iron was immune to magic and detrimental, even fatal, to elves and fairies.And elsewhere in the Lost online archives, Iben had found references to the Krusk Magnetic Anomaly, site to the world’s largest iron deposits and one of the most magnetic spots on Earth.

Admittedly, Iben failed to see how these references added up to a story. For one thing, how would the numbers fit in? After further web surfing, Iben thought maybe it would work if the numbers referred to elements on the periodic table: 4 – Beryllium, 8—Oxygen, 15 – Phosphorus, 16 – Sulfur, 23 – Vanadium, 42 – Molybdenum. How would this fit with the end-of-days calculation? Perhaps in whatever reality the Lost world existed these elements were key to life as they knew it. He could sell that, he thought.

Unfortunately, Iron, number 26, was not represented as one of the numbers. Iben spent the pre-dawn hours trying to make a connection no matter how fragile between the six elements that fit the numbers and iron, and just as the Christmas morning sun turned the gray morning a merry cranberry red, he believed he’d found a pattern that might work.

“Wait for me, boy?” The white Lab had race ahead and disappeared into a crater. When Iben caught up, he was digging into black shiny sand. Iben was trying to see what the dog had found. “Move, Bops,” he commanded. The dog lifted his head, trotted over to Iben and dropped a glass eye into the palm of his hand. “Geez, that’s so cold it burns,” Iben said staring into the unblinking orb that then rolled over in his hand and shot a beam of light onto the blank wall behind him. Iben was suddenly chilled to his very core. He looked up out of the black pit and saw drifts of snow and a snowman was looking down on him. “Gelar!” the snowman said. Bops bounded into the black crater that had now revealed itself to be a tunnel. Iben dropped the eyeball and chased after him hoping to escape the cold, but the darkness was cold, too, so cold it felt like he was swimming through black snow, submerged in a lightless substance that allowed him to breathe but slowed his movements until he had to struggle to put one foot in front of the other. He was so exhausted, and cold, if only he’d hung onto the eye at least he’d be able to see where this tendril of warm, moist, meaty air was coming from.

Iben awoke to a snoot full of dog breath and an imprint of a keyboard on his cheek. Someone was knocking on the door, which made the dog bark excitedly and race toward the sound. Iben saw Dr. Apollo sitting in the wing chair next to the still crackling fire engrossed in his notes from the previous night.

“It’ll never work,” Iben said, referencing the pages she held.

“Merry Christmas,” she said, ignoring his negativism. “You’ll feel much better after you’ve had a hearty breakfast.”

A Santa-hatted waiter pushed in a room service trolley loaded with things to be merry about. Dr. Apollo clapped her hands with delight.

“Iben, I’ve asked them to prepare all of the foods I remember from my youth. I hoped to recreate the feeling of hygge, the feeling I most associate with being in a happy home.”

“Are you from here, then?” he inquired.

“Not originally… but come try the Frikadeller, the beef hash, the hot chocolate. And here’s the Risengrod! You know this is a favorite of Santa’s elves,” she said, filling his plate with food.

As he finished his first helping, he felt restored enough to bring up a subject he’d avoided long enough.

“Last night before you arrived at the hotel,” he began. “Hamish called.”

He didn’t want to alarm her so he was hesitant to go on. She looked very content offering the dog a Frikadeller from the palm of her misshapen hand, the one Iben knew she often attempted to hide or cover. Content, yet vulnerable.

“He…Hamish didn’t…” Iben stumbled over the unspoken words.

The dog savored the meatball, his head moving from Iben to Dr. Apollo and back again as though caught up in the tentative conversation and wondering what was going to be said next.

“He said it was time to come home,” Iben fibbed briskly.

The fire sparked festively, and the tree twinkled happily and the dog cocked his head, begging an unspoken question.

Dr. Apollo inhaled deeply of her cup of Glogg as though trying to commit its spicy scent to her personal hygge memory bank.

“I’m sure he did,” she said at last. “Since he had no idea that you’d left New York.”

“But how did you know?” Iben asked. “I was so afraid that you’d be completely freaked out to find out we’d been sent here on false pretenses. I have no idea how to explain what happened.”

“No, Iben. I’m the one who must explain. It was my idea to come here. I thought that it would be a good thing. That what you would discover here would be a tremendous boon to the success of your project.”

“Did you?” Iben didn’t know what question to ask next there were so many. For instance, why all the mystery?

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I didn’t tell you what I had in mind. The truth, I’d hoped that the trip could be accomplished without you learning I had anything to do with it.”

Really? Iben thought. “Okay,” he said. “I can understand why you would think a trip to the home of the Hanso Foundation might help me finish this assignment. I get that, intellectually. A little bit. Yes, it does seem like an incredibly generous gesture for one friend to make toward another, but if Copenhagen is your home, and you somehow have access to a private jet, and the wherewithal to check into a three-bedroom suite in a five-star hotel…..with a dog.” That gave him pause. “No, you know what, I don’t understand anything at all,” Iben said, dropping his aching head into his open hands.

“Well, here’s the explanation. I thought it might help if you could meet your father,” she said.

“My father?” Iben laughed. “No one knows my father. I was abandoned on the doorstep of the Helios Foundation. I’m a foundling. It’s not something that even you, Professor Apollo, would be able to Google so don’t feel bad that it didn’t work out.”

“Your mistaken, Iben,” she countered. “One person knows who your father is.”

Was this another riddle? Iben hated riddles

“I give up,” he said. “Like who?”

“I do,” she said.

“You do?” he asked.

There was a knock at the door.

“Iben, the person standing on the other side of this door is your father. Before you meet him, it’s important that you understand how I know him.”

Iben did know, but was powerless to say so.

“That’s correct, Iben. I am your mother,” she said.

“Who is he?” Iben asked his eyes fastened on the door.

“Enzo Valenzetti, my darling. Who else could it be?”

Chapter Eight: Blindsided

2007-01-26T21:28:00.001-08:00

“When I was a child we lived on the Island of Sardinia off the coast of Italy. I recall, even today, the smell of salt spray, brine and fish as it drifted in on seemingly every breeze. My mother would stand at the villa wall each morning and look out at the white beaches of the Mediterranean Sea. I remember thinking how beautiful she looked standing there on the obsidian gravel of the courtyard as the wind blew back her hair. That simple memory is ingrained in my mind forever. In the distance, hungry gulls would spin about in the sky crying like children. The city of Cagliari stood dew-laden in the early morning shadows behind our home. I would sit in the dooryard working for hours on my equations as the sun cast piebald shadows over my face. My mother would jokingly tease me about my expression of unadulterated concentration and she wondered out loud many times where I’d come by that trait. It was not a common gesture for either her or my father. She already knew that I was an especially odd child but she told me many times that she knew I was also an exceptionally gifted child. You see, my ability to conclude a problem in both mathematics and social situations bordered on the genius and my mother harbored high hopes for my future.”

Iben listened intently as Enzo Valenzetti, who had just been introduced to him by his long-lost mother as his long-lost father, recited the story of his incredible life - the boy genius whose eponymous yet mysterious equation outlining the fate of mankind gave new and dire import to the phrase “you do the math.”

Iben thought he knew where this was going because he’d been reading up on Valenzetti as research for his writing assignment The Apocalypse Equation. Iben had a sliver of space in his buzzing brain to wonder how a guy almost eighty could look as good as he did. In fact, both his parents looked great for the ages they claimed and Iben held out hope that he had at the very least inherited their Dorian Grey DNA, although somehow he doubted it.

“While the world was waging war, I was attending a very prestigious university and my father was becoming exceedingly rich from profits obtained selling mess kits to the German Army. But the year I graduated from the Fibonacci State Institute of Advanced Sciences my father hung himself from a tree in the town square. I was sixteen. I was told later that he was convinced that he would be labeled a war criminal and a Nazi sympathizer and that he would go to trial as such. To alleviate the shame and dishonor he thought this would cause his family he took matters into his own hands. It turns out, Iben, that he probably would not have been tried and certainly not shot but we Valenzettis have a tendency to work out problems in our head before they go out into the real world. It’s a family trait, of sorts. I’m certain you know what I mean.”

Iben had to think about it. Until now he’d had no real family, and therefore no shared traits to consider. Now he was sitting in front of two people who apparently understood him right down to his genes. It made him feel decidedly uncomfortable that they professed to know so much about him, while he knew absolutely nothing about them. True he’d researched the fictional life - and death! - of Enzo Valenzetti and Dr. Apollo had been a friend for a long while, but now it seemed that Valenzetti was more real than Apollo since everything she’d told him about herself had been a cover story to keep him from learning her true identity.

Dr. Apollo looked at him gravely. “Iben, please believe that I never wanted to lie to you. I only wanted to protect you.”

“Now, now, my dear,” Valenzetti said soothingly, putting a comforting arm around his mate’s bird-fragile shoulders. “Iben, you need to understand the gravity of the situation as we saw it, as we lived it. Let me continue my story.”

“There once was an extremely beautiful woman who had the entire world in her hands. She was smart and inquisitive with an intellect that matched university professors twice her age. At nineteen this woman met a man, a driven man with only one idea in his mind. It drove him. It became his sole purpose in life. This man was proclaimed the greatest mathematician ever born and seemed to be living up to the reputation. But, in those star-crossed days of youth he fell in love with two things: The woman you see sitting before you today and the idea that he could somehow save the world. He wooed the young lady but only half-heartedly. His work was ultimately more important to him. Yet she too fell in love. When a child was born they were at odds for the first time. He had the world to save and she was too young to raise the child herself. They turned first to the Helios Foundation and later to St. Anthony’s because they knew they would take good care of him, nurture him, teach him. And they did.”

“I got C’s,” Iben said. “How is it that I turn out to be the son of two bona fide geniuses?”

Iben had no illusions. He knew he was a bit of a plodder. That’s not to say he had no ambitions, just none so grandiose that they couldn’t be achieved through patient, dogged effort. He’d never thought of himself as a genius. Hardly. He certainly never imagined himself as a world changer. Now the world and all of its problems were being thrust upon him and he felt pretty resentful, to tell the truth. He was beginning to suspect that before long he was going to be forced to make decisions and even take action that in all likelihood would prove to be either highly dangerous or futile or some deadly combination of both.

“Please let me finish, Iben” Valenzetti said. “It is important to all of us that you hear everything. And I mean everything. You may ask any question you’d like when I am done but please allow me to finish what I must tell you.”

Iben nodded his assent.

“We were pleased that you became a man who loved words,” Valenzetti continued, “and while I had aspirations for you in the hard sciences it seems you followed more in the steps of your mother who loved literature. Be that as it may, we knew no position to give you a secure childhood. The very fact of your existence and in many ways the simple knowledge of your existence may have placed you in mortal danger. Unscrupulous groups may have tried to coerce me by kidnapping you or threatening your life.”

This was exactly the sort of trouble Iben had seen coming and he was almost certain he was not up to the challenge. Still, here he was sitting in a Copenhagen hotel room with two people who claimed to be his parents - one of whom had drugged and kidnapped him, the other a figment of some other writer’s imagination. Were they for real?

“This is what Marty must have felt like when he got “Back to the Future” and discovered that Lorraine and George had been transformed into total Yuppies. Was this his real “real” life? Or had his trip through time truly altered the future? Maybe what I need is a DeLorean to blast me back to the past,” Iben lamented distractedly.

Apollo and Valenzetti supplied grins of empty amiability. They clearly had no idea what he was getting at. For that matter, Iben didn’t really know what it was he was getting at. He was a lost soul just like the castaways on Lost, and he didn’t know which direction to go to find his bearings: he could follow Jack Shepherd’s example and tough it out, keeping all of his questions to himself. Or he could do it John Locke’s way and assign some kind of mystical relevance to this bizarre twist of fate. Then there was always Hurley’s way. Hurley at least asked the questions. The problem was, in asking, he was also likely to get answers that he might not want to hear.

Doctors Apollo and Valenzetti were waited expectantly, and then all at once they perked up.

“Ask us anything, son,” Dr. Valenzetti offered. “And we’ll expend one point twenty-one gigawatts into the flux-capacitor of our brains to get you to the answer.”

See, that’s what Iben worried about. Stuff like what happened right there. A minute ago they’d never heard of a Marty McFly or his trip big-screen adventure into the past, and now they were quoting the script verbatim. That can’t be good.

“All righty, then,” Iben began before faltering. “But… ah… how… um… why…” he blustered.

He calmed himself and started again.

“Right. Okay,” Iben took a breath, and looked Valenzetti in the eye. “Dude, you do know that you’re a fictional character? A dead fictional character. You play an off-camera role in the American television show Lost?”

Valenzetti and Apollo continued to gaze steadily at their son, seemingly urging him on while offering no response of their own to his question.

“Okay. Well, I guess my next question would have to be: if you’re a fictional character,” Iben paused here sucking in air and letting it out in little Lamaze-like puffs. “Does that mean I’m a fictional character, too?”

Valenzetti and Apollo turned to each other in confusion just as perplexed parents have done since the dawn of time when faced with the bewildering thought processes of their offspring. Then, they burst out laughing.

“Well, my dear, he’s not a scientist, you know. He’s a writer. And what an imagination!” Dr. Apollo said, clearly relieved that this foolishness was the only thing troubling her son.

“I blame it on that friend of yours at the Helios Foundation. All that New Age, mumbo-jumbo,” Dr. Valenzetti chuckled, shaking an indulgent finger at his diminutive bride.

“Pshaw, I told you we should have sent him to obedience school.”

Iben watched the interaction with growing concern. The events of the past weeks did not seem to warrant this kind of teasing. There had to be some reason why this was happening to him. Why he had been yanked from his unassuming, live-and-let-live life and plunged into this off-kilter, kill-or-be killed existence. He’d written lots of these novelizations before and never had their storylines slopped over into his day-to-day reality. Why now? And what was he supposed to do next?

His parents began to sober up a bit and after taking a few moments to wipe merry tears from their eyes, Dr. Apollo turned to Iben with a big smile.

“I know we have a lot of catching up to do. And you deserve a much more complete explanation of why we’ve stayed silent until now. But first, you have a writing assignment to complete. It will mean so much to your future success, my dear, and your father and I want to help you in every possible way to make the most of this chance,” Dr. Apollo said.

“After all, who better to explain the Valenzetti Equation than its author?” Iben’s old man answered, “Think about it: I’m easily as interesting a genius as Dr. Emmett L. Brown. If George McFly can write a bestselling science- fiction novel called “A Match Made in Space,” there’s absolutely no reason why Iben Powned can’t do the same thing with the much more promising title, The Apocalypse Equation!”

“Let’s not be overbearing, Enzo,” Dr. Apollo said. “We can offer every insight and assistance to Iben, but the first question that needs to be answered is WWID? What Would Iben Do?”

Whoa! How did they do that? They couldn’t have possibly come up with that on their own. He’d said the same thing several days ago, but only in the privacy of his own mind. Unless he talked in his sleep, there’s no way they could have overheard. It was eerie, like the way Desmond knew what Locke was going to say in his speech on the beach before it happened. Or how Ben Linus knew that Jack was interested in the Red Sox World Series outcome or how he could quote paragraphs of text from “Of Mice and Men” to Sawyer only moments after failing to pick up on Sawyer’s allusion to the book. Or how the airplane mobile in the Other’s nursery for Claire’s baby looked the same and played the same song that she had only dreamed about.

It reminded Iben of television talking heads, those news guys who look straight at the camera and report stories while the information is being whispered into their earpieces from an unseen production booth where a director keeps track of all the breaking news stories. When he thought about it, it wasn’t so different a set up than that of Ben’s bank of monitors in the Hydra hatch. It couldn’t be, could it, that his parents were able to read his mind somehow? What exactly had happened to him when the policeman, St. Germaine, took him in for questioning? Had he made Iben’s brain readable? And if so, was someone reading it now? How about now? Suddenly it felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room, his head spun and his stomach lurched. Talk about an invasion of privacy, when your thoughts are no longer your personal property, what happens to free will? You can’t just stop thinking. Well, there’s one way you can, the ultimate last resort his grandfather used as an escape hatch.

Just when Iben thought that solution might be his only escape, there was a knock at the door.

“Room Service,” a Scandinavian-accented voice said through the door. Delivery for Mr. Iben Powned.”

Iben shuffled unsteadily to the door and found on the other side a rather fierce-looking bellboy.

“A package for you, Mr. Powned,” he said handing Iben a bubble-envelope with an ABC label addressed to Iben.

“Hope it’s a bomb,” Iben joked.

“Sign here, please,” the bellboy said without expression, shoving a pad and pen into Iben’s hands. On the piece of paper was written in orange block letters: DON’T ASK ME ANY QUESTIONS. DO EXACTLY THIS. TELL THEM THE TAPE IS FROM YOUR AGENT. WATCH THE DVD IMMEDIATELY. YOUR PARENTS EYES WILL NOT BE ABLE SEE WHAT’S ON THE SCREEN. THEY WILL ONLY HEAR THE AUDIO TRACK. FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN ON THE SCREEN OR ALL WILL BE LOST. THAT MEANS YOU. DON’T THINK; OBEY.

“Tak,” Iben said, using the only word in Danish he knew by heart. He had no idea what was on this disc, but whatever it was it offered an alternative to the oblivion that had nearly engulfed him moments ago. He closed the door, tore open the envelope and popped the enclosed DVD into the suite’s home-theater player.

“Looks like Hamish tracked me down” Iben said realizing his voice was too strident and over loud. He needed to improve his acting skills if he was going to get through this charade. “He’s sent something from the network. Maybe this will help us get a grip on The Apocalypse Equation.”

The intro music from E! TV came on and a reporter’s voice said, “Bad news for the intrepid castaways on Lost, ABC has decided it will end the suspense of the uber-mystery series sooner rather than later.

Iben’s gasp owed nothing to his acting skills and everything to spontaneous distress, now he’d never get a network staff writing job. A moment later a woman absolutely unrelated to E! TV appeared on the screen. It was the girl who’d visited his apartment back in New York. She was holding up hand-lettered cards.

“SETTLE DOWN. LOST HAS NOT BEEN CANCELLED.”

Too late, Iben was already drenched in flop sweat. He turned to see Apollo and Valenzetti’s reactions. They were scowling at the TV screen, but he could tell they were worried about the cancellation, and for some reason they did not see the girl’s out of context appearance.

STOP SWEATING. THEY CANNOT READ YOUR MIND. THEY CAN ONLY ACCESS YOUR MEMORIES. SO ACT FAST. SHOW THEM HOW FURIOUS YOU ARE AT THE CANCELLATION.

“Whatthe…?” Iben sputtered.

TRY HARDER, the next card read.

“WHATTHE (@_&^%&**#)????!!!” Iben emoted.

“Oh, my dear, you don’t think this will endanger your assignment?” Dr. Apollo inquired.

SAY: “THIS IS NOT FAIR.” TELL THEM THAT IT MEANS THE BOOK IS CANCELLED, TOO.

IIben did as he was told and even added a flourish of his own, “Nice of Hamish to let me know this way, the Haggis-eating, skirt wearing, bagpiper.”

RANT. RAVE. THROW A TANTRUM.

Iben tantrumed.

READ THE NEXT CARD THEN TEAR THE DVD FROM THE PLAYER, SMASH IT.

Iben read.

Iben smashed.

STORM OUT OF THE ROOM. DON’T LET THEM STOP YOU OR COME WITH YOU. WE WILL BE WAITING IN A WHITE PANELED TRUCK WITH A SAD-FACED CLOWN IN A RING OF FIRE PAINTED ON THE SIDE.

Iben did exactly as he was told. He swore and stomped, grabbed his coat and his fanny pack in a rage, only to find himself stalled at the doors of the private elevator that provided entrance to the penthouse suite. This was awkward. He stabbed the button repeatedly as his parents began hovering. How long was it, he wondered, before his thoughts became readable memories?

“Iben, let us come with you,” Valenzetti said. “Come on, Mother, our boy shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”

Jeez, would the elevator never get here? Iben thought he just might be having a stroke when his cell phone rang and he dug it out of the fanny pack.

“Say, ‘Hamish,” the woman’s voice commanded.

“Hamish!” Iben shouted. “You son-of-a-hag…”

“Shut up and listen,” the voice on the phone ordered with urgent irritation. “Don’t wait for the elevator, take the stairs. There’s an exit door from the suite, the third door down the corridor to your left. Don’t worry; they can’t chase you down twenty flights of stairs.”

Iben took off running. Ten minutes later, he reached the sidewalk, his sides splitting from the unusual exertion, panting for breath he realized that Apollo and Valenzetti could have easily beat him to the street using the elevator. He frantically searched the street for the clown truck. Nothing. It was nowhere to be seen. Oh, no. It looked like he’d been cast as the Locke character in this scenario, doomed to be fooled not once, not twice, but each and every time. He tried his cell phone, redialing the last number that had called him. It began to ring.

And it rang. Iben scanned the street and caught sight of the hotel’s doorman as he held open the gold-tinted glass door to make way for a blond lab and her human companions merging.

And rang. Iben couldn’t see a viable hiding place that wouldn’t also cross his mom and dad’s sightlines. Maybe he should just throw himself in front of this approaching bus.

“Tak!” a woman’s voice answered at last. “Vikingeskibsmuseet.”

“What?” Iben bleated. “I mean, excuse me. I beg your pardon? Say again?”

“Jeg forstår ikke,” she said slowly, enunciating each syllable as though that might help the words penetrate his thick head.

“Wait a minute,” Iben replied with equal volume and precision as cowered between parked cars while digging out his Danish phrase book.

“Taler De engelsk?” he gasped.

“Ja ja!” she said enthusiastically, and then put him on hold. Iben stared at the phone despondently when at last he was greeted by an English-language recording: “You have reached The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde thirty kilometers from Copenhagen,” but Iben couldn’t concentrate on her directions because he could hear - heck, he could almost smell - the doggy breath closing in on his hiding spot.

“Hey, brother,” a voice called out to him from a car window. “Don’t I know you from another lifetime?”

A miniature white panel truck sped up beside him and screeched to a halt. Crammed inside the toy-sized interior were the fierce bellboy, the girl from Thanksgiving, and, accordioned into the back haul space, was Hamish himself who reached out, yanked Iben right off his haunches, just as the lab had sniffed out his quarry and was about to go into full retriever mode. Iben’s feet still protruded from the clown car as the driver shifted gears, slid across four lanes of dense traffic and sped away, either away from or straight into his doom. Iben didn’t dare guess which way it was going to go.

Once Iben had found a way to accommodate his limbs and operate his lungs, he decided to ask, “Hamish, what’s this all about?”

Hamish considered the question. “Oh, I think you know.”

“No, Hamish, I do not know.” Iben insisted.

“Really? Well, then the problem is that whatever you know, you don’t know you know. At least not yet.”

Iben lapsed into stricken, hopeless silence. He knew for sure he did not now nor had he ever known anything that would make any sense of this.

“Ah, don’t worry you’re wee head, Iben,” Hamish said. “Whatever’s stuck up in there,” he said poking Iben’s forehead with this finger, “we’ll pry it out of you or die trying.”

Iben sighed. “Better you than me,” Iben thought, and wondered if somewhere someone was reading this impolitic thought and what it would mean to him if he had been overheard.

“I didn’t mean that,” Iben said out loud to the unseen powers that be.

“No, no, don’t apologize for sighing,” Hamish countered. “We’re all a bit uptight. Truth be known, I misspoke myself just now, too. What I meant to say was that we’re going to do whatever it takes to get at the truth inside your brain, if that is indeed where the solution resides, and we really, sincerely hope that you don’t die while we’re trying.”

And then, without another thought, errant or otherwise, Iben did the only sensible thing to do and fainted dead away.

Chapter Nine: Every Dog Has Its Day

2007-01-26T21:28:00.000-08:00

“What I can’t understand is why you? How did you attract their attention? What do they want with you? What were they looking for in your apartment?”

The woman’s tone of hushed outrage roused Iben to the extent that he felt his intestines shrivel a little when he realized she’d turned her ire directly on his prone figure.

“Søren, perhaps you should slap him; he’s fainted again.”

Iben opened his eyes one at a time, focusing first on the fiercely Nordic bellboy doing the driving, and then bringing the woman’s face into focus just as she pulled the brown pageboy wig off her head and a mass of blonde locks tumbled free. Iben quickly squeezed his open eye shut. She actually looked scarier as a blonde. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she decided to try waking him up herself - with a tire iron.

“Now, now, children, no need to resort to violence,” Iben heard Hamish intervene on his behalf and was emboldened enough to speak.

“Sorry. It happened again, didn’t it? I passed out?” Iben spoke the words haltingly. “Hamish, can you tell me what the heck’s going on here?”

“’Fraid not,” Hamish said.

“Can you at least explain how you got here?”

Hamish shook his head. “I know as much or as little about it as you do. I tried to find you at your apartment. It seems impossible, but that must have been only a couple of days ago. I remember I had a Christmas present for you. It feels like it happened a lifetime ago,” the agent said wistfully. “I saw from the street that your window was boarded up.

The doorman said someone had taken a shot at you and the police had been there, and that some time later an ambulance had arrived and taken you away. You were unconscious. I got him to let me into your apartment and that’s when I met Hansel and Gretel here. They appeared to be dismantling your digs, brother. After that I don’t remember too much, but they say they required my assistance in their urgent attempt to rescue you from a pack of hell hounds in sheep-like disguise,” Hamish stopped there, but Iben sensed his agent didn’t believe that story. “And here I am. Here we are.”

The truck was rocketing forward at a great rate of speed, so it seemed where they were was on the run.

“That’s what they told me, too,” Iben said, trying to find a handhold in order to stay upright in the bouncing box. “By the way,” Iben directed his comment to the blonde. “How did you do that? How come they couldn’t see you holding up the cards on the TV screen? It was …way more than creepy.”

“We were right, though, weren’t we? I’ve been watching these people very closely” Søren responded with what Iben later would characterize as psycho pride. “I watch their every move.”
“I watch, too,” the blonde seethed.

“So, Søren, why the hate on my mom and dad?” Iben asked.

“They are not who you think they are,” Søren spat back. “I have been working to fight their evil around the globe. Then, on October 6th of last year, my comrades were all killed in the explosion at the Hanso Foundation headquarters.”

“You’re a lucky dog,” Hamish said. “Living to fight another day, and all.”

“Yes, that was lucky,” Søren said, swerving to force a school bus into the ditch.

Iben turned to the woman. “Are you a survivor, too?’

“I am Rachel Blake, you fool,” she said. “What do they see in you? You can’t figure out the most blatantly obvious…”

“Excuse me; it’s just that you look nothing like…” Iben said.

“Do you believe everything you see on You-Tube?” she scoffed.

“You must know that they are not like us from the fact that they could not see what was on the TV,” Søren said in a voice filled with lucid lunacy. “The best way to explain it is by referring you to Lost. The scene when Juliet asks Jack if he wants to see To Kill A Mockingbird but instead it’s a videotape of her holding up cards asking Jack to kill Ben.”

“Right,” Hamish said, egging him on. “I never got that. If Ben is always watching what Jack’s doing in his cell, why didn’t he see Juliet’s message?”

“That’s what we wondered too and it gave us and idea that their eyes are not like ours - they being Ben and the other Others, or in your case, “Dr. Apollo” and “Dr. Valenzetti.” Søren took both hands off the wheel to supply the air quotes. “After careful scrutiny we devised many tests to prove our hypothesis. We were able to determine that what humans see as a normal television image appears to be nothing more than flickering light to them.”

Humans? Iben and Hamish didn’t need words to communicate their mutual concern, “If Søren doesn’t think the Others were human, what kind of crazy might he be?”

“We’ve determined this difference is due to the frequency at which rapidly flickering light appears to fuse into a constantly illuminated light. Technically, it’s called "flicker fusion." In most humans, flicker fusion occurs at around 50 to 60 Hertz, or cycles per second. However, the flicker fusion rate for Ben and friends is higher, 70 to 80 Hertz. This is why they can’t see what’s on the television. The refresh rate on televisions is about 60 Hertz. So, you saw a picture; Dr. Apollo and Dr. Valenzetti saw a flashing light.”

“Does that mean they’re aliens?” Iben asked. “Or robots with mechanical eyes?”

“No,” Søren answered. “At least we don’t know that for a fact. But they are definitely a different breed. They also have better night vision - substantially better - than do we. And they seem to be more or less color blind. Their visual spectrum is divided into two hues, basically blue and yellow. But they are able to see the difference between subtle shades of gray better than we can.”

Iben was agog. What should they make of a person who made such a thorough investigation of so esoteric a topic as the Other’s eyesight? The TV thing seemed important, but color blindness? Was Søren on the right track or off his rocker?

“Is that why when the man with the patch showed up on the hatch monitor his image was all streaky?” Hamish asked, clearly intrigued by the theory. “Are those monitors set at a “flicker fusion” level that Ben and the Others can see? How extremely clever of you to figure that out, Søren.”

Rachel nodded her head and beamed adoringly at the darkly handsome driver.
“Think about it, all the hatch monitors are black and white,” she added. “Søren doesn’t think it has anything to do with old technology. He believes they’re specially designed for Others’ eyes.”

“We have a theory about that eye-patch, too,” Søren said, shrieking past an Audi that must have been doing 110.

“That’s right,” Rachel agreed. “We don’t think the eye-patch means he’s missing an eye. We think the eye-patch helps keep one of the patch man’s eyes dark-adapted.”

“Brilliant!” Hamish exclaimed. “I saw that on the “Mythbusters” pirate episode: Adam and Jaime proved that if you keep one eye covered with an eye patch, that eye’s rods are always prepared to see better in the dark than the eye that has been ‘washed’ with light. So you think Patchy wears one so that he can see as well, or almost as well, as the Other’s see in the dark? It’s his defense against The Dark Side.”

“Shut up,” Rachel snapped like an arctic wind chill, “What we need you to talk about is what they want from you. Why is this man so important to them?” she beseeched an indifferent universe.

“This is a matter of your life or death,” Søren said, turning his eyes away from the road to face his backseat passengers. Iben couldn’t help but notice that he had the longest eyelashes he’d ever seen on a guy, and then reflected on the weirdness of that thought. Iben believed that thoughts were not really random, so he must have noticed the eyelashes for a reason. “What are you doing in Copenhagen?”

“Okay. Just take it easy,” Iben suggested. “I want you to know I really appreciate your helping me escape and really wish I could help you out but, I’m sorry, I don’t have any answers to your questions. I don’t know who those people back at the hotel are. I don’t know what they want with me. All I know is that the trouble started with the writing assignment: The Apocalypse Equation.”

“No. It can’t be that,” Søren said, “We watch their every move and their surveillance of you started weeks before you got the job.”

Iben thought a moment. “When did you send ABC my writing samples, Hamish?”
“Oh, months ago. God, was it as early as June?”

“Writing samples? What kind of writing samples?” Rachel demanded.

“Well, let’s see. I sent them your novelization of the Sci-Fi Original about the Irish crocodile,” Hamish said.

“Erin Go BRRRAAAGGGG!” Iben added.

“Yes. And that one from the alien-conspiracy docu-drama: The Hillenkotter Conjecture, and the synopsis of your doomsday trilogy.”

“Really? Under Wormwood? I thought you said that was a non-starter?”

“Dear boy, I couldn’t sell it, but it is the only piece of your writing that isn’t a re-do of someone else’s work.”

“What’s this thing about?” she barked impatiently.

“It’s a three-parter; a potential mini-series. The first part is called Ogdy’s Lodge Pole; part two, At the Monastery of Sarov and part three is the Snowmen of Chernobyl.”

The woman and Søren exchanged less-than-stealthy glances.

“Chernobyl?” Søren said feigning only mild interest in the subject. Then he and Rachel whispered between themselves and Rachel searched through the glove compartment and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper.

“Look at this,” the Titian-eyelashed Søren ordered.

“This was on the Valenzetti Foundation website,” he said while Iben studied the list of elements.
After several seconds of solemn consideration Iben said, “So this is it? The Apocalypse Equation?”

“Idiot! That is not an equation!” Rachel said with such contempt Iben thought she might flunk him or crack his knuckles with a ruler.

“Hey, take it easy,” Iben shot back.

“Look, I never claimed to know anything about either the apocalypse or the equation. My dad—if he is my dad—may be a mathematical genius, but me, I coasted through high school science classes. In college I took Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on TV for credit. I’m a total noob on the subject of science.”

“You’re lying. And you’re as bad a liar as you are a writer. If you know nothing about this then how is it that when you put together the chemical names for these elements they spell Chernobog Assassin? Your script is about Chernobyl, isn’t it. And you know what they call Søren? They call him the Snowman. Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences.” Rachel blasted back like Geraldo hard on the scent of a satanic cultist or, worse, Jon Stewart.

“No kidding,” Iben said, instantly fascinated. “I guess I’d have to ask how you got that nickname, but I already know about Chernobog. In Russian mythology, he’s the god of Darkness and Belobog is the God of Light. Chernobyl is a combination of those two names. I use that as a metaphor in “Under Wormwood.” Iben had never admitted it even to himself, but nothing stirred his blood more than the opportunity to discuss “Under Wormwood.” It was a secret passion that he’d put aside for more sensible pursuits like paying the rent.

“Something you might not know,” Iben teased like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat, seeming not to notice that his audience might be inclined to shoot the bunny on sight before drawing a bead on him.

“In Ukrainian, Chernobyl is the name of a grass, wormwood.” Iben paused for dramatic effect then play-acted a spastic-looking shiver “Whoa, did the temperature in here just drop to spooky?”

“No, dear boy, it just rose to blush. Do get on with it, you’re making me quite embarrassed for you,” Hamish begged with a nervous laugh.

“This word wormwood scares the holy bejesus out of people,” Iben continued undeterred. “And do you know why?”

He had no takers.

“Tough crowd,” he observed. “Wormwood is mentioned in the book of the Revelations foretelling the end of the world.”

The pair in the front seats froze and Iben the storyteller reveled in his achievement, “Got’um eatin’ outta my hand,” he thought, until they spoke, that is.
“Revelations 8:10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters,” Søren recited without emotion.

“And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter. Revelations 8:11,” Rachel finished the quote in a flat, monotone.

“That’s it! Chernobyl: double the metaphor; double the fun!” Iben said uncertainly. These guys were so not fun. “Do you think someone from ABC read my synopsis and used it on this Valenzetti website?” Despite Søren and Rachel’s pathological Bible spouting, Iben had to admit he was tickled. He’d never written anything good enough to be stolen before.

“This is not about you” a semi re-animated Søren said, his knuckles white on the wheel, his raven hair making a stark contrast to the color rising along the crest of his sculpted cheekbones. He looked a little like a Viking god springing to mortal life, Iben thought novelistically.

“That’s funny, I thought you said it was all about me,” Iben said.

“Don’t you understand that this is proof of their diabolical plan to bring about the end of the world?” Søren lamented. “This formula was on the website before June. More likely they saw your synopsis and thought you knew too much, that their secrets had been leaked and that you were taunting them. No wonder they’re out to kill you.”

“Now, now, let’s not get carried away,” Hamish said.

“I agree, but truth be told, Søren’s got a point,” Iben said. “However, I think he might have it backwards. From a storytelling point of view, the fact that this code reads Chernobog Assassin actually seems to indicate that the author is trying to warn us that someone is trying to assassinate Chernbog, the dark god. So wouldn’t that make the assassin Belobog? The good god? God of light? Wouldn’t that make the code writers the good guys?”

Hamish instantly recognized the danger in this line of conversation. “I for one think you’re reading way too much into this Chernobog thing. Lighten up, guys. Sometimes the play’s the thing…and that’s all there is to it.”

“You think we’re making this up in our heads?” Rachel demanded. “Was I making too much of that very real bullet I dodged on Thanksgiving? Would you be telling me to lighten up if you were standing next to my open grave?”

“But, see, you didn’t die,” Hamish said calmly. “My point is not to scold you, but simply give you something to think about. It all puts me in mind of a story I once read, one of those avant-garde things that never get published in the States. It was called Ptosis' Dog and it was a cautionary tale about trying to impose too much meaning where none actually exists.”

“What are you talking about dogs? Are you saying I’m a bitch?” Rachel raged. Beside her, Søren’s eyelashes bristled.

“No, nothing of the kind,” Hamish responded.

“Anyway, the story is about this post-apocalyptic world where imagination has been eradicated. Every manifestation of culture had been wiped out in the wars and creativity is dead. Then someone found a single movie still in existence, “Bombay Love Nights,” and the people watched the movie over and over again, cataloguing every detail, analyzing every word said, every piece of scenery, silverware, drapery, every single frame was carefully and painstakingly recorded in the Great Encyclopedia of Bombay Nights of Love.”

“He may not be calling me a bitch; but I will call him a fool. Fool!” Rachel sneered.

“Go on,” Søren encouraged Hamish. “I won’t let her kill you until I know how this insult ends.”

Hamish cleared his throat, struggled a bit to form words, then pushed on valiantly, “Ptosis was a citizen that wanted to become someone important, he watched the movie ten hours a day for thirty years to discover something in it no one else had seen. One day he saw something through the holes of a basket, which he concluded was a fox-terrier. His discovery made him famous and celebrated until a rival discovered it was simply a shadow. Ptosis was deleted from history books but lived on as a popular saying; ‘Lest we discover another Ptosis' dog.’”
“Huh? I don’t think I get it,” Iben admitted.

“I get it perfectly. He says we’re dupes. He says that our hands are being guided by those who think we’re morons. What he’s saying is that Lost is a TV show and that we’re idiots who think it’s all real. But it is just the shadow of a fox terrier,” Rachel seethed.

“I don’t know if that’s what he’s saying,” Iben said. “Of course, I’ve never read it, but who’s to say Ptosis’ rival had the right answer? Why did the crowd side with the other guy? Ptosis saw things from a different point of view—a better one, and maybe he saw the truth. Maybe the fools were the ones who didn’t see, who didn’t believe their own eyes.

“Nicely put,” Hamish said.

“And what’s more,” Iben continued. “This world without imagination business and the search for meaning. Doesn’t that kind of remind you of the Others and all of the book and movie references they’re so fond of making? What’s that all about? Are they searching for meaning in those stories? Or do they just need to hire a good writer to help them tell their story in their own words?”

“Do do do do doo do. Do do do do doo do.”

“There it is,” Iben sat up quickly, bumping his head on the roof of the panel trucklette. “That’s the music-box tune.”

“Do do do do doo do.”

“Where’s that coming from?” Iben peered out the back window.

“Sorry, it’s just my beeper,” Hamish said, and pushed the button that quieted the sound and signaled he’d received the page.

DO DO DO DO DOO DO. DO DO DO DO DOO DO.

Instantly the small sound had been replaced by a much louder one that definitely came from outside the vehicle. Iben looked out the back window and saw three Apollo candy trucks boxing in the clown car and forcing Søren to a stop.

“You?” Iben said to Hamish, as he watched slack-jawed as Dr. Apollo and Dr. Valenzetti and a white Labrador retriever emerge from the cab of the heavenly blue truck.

“That’s alright, brother,” Hamish said, slapping him on the back.

“You can thank me later.”

******

A Dharma beach ball hit the ground and sand peppered his open, staring eye like nano-buckshot.

“Sorry, Dude.” He heard as he tried to blink the blinding grains away. The sun was beating down on him and he wondered how long he’d been passed out on this beach? He brushed at his cheek where sweat had glued the gritty sand to his face and the slightest touch made his skin feel like it was covered with fire ants. Sunburn he surmised. Oww. Somewhere in the back of his mind it occurred to him that he should be cold? He remembered snow, but the heat of the sun convinced him it must have been a wish fulfillment dream that he hadn’t quite come out of.

He pulled himself up to his elbows, and when his itchy eyes focused he saw Charlie and Hurley practicing their golf swings, whacking mangoes into the blue-green surf. Buffoons, he thought. As if there weren’t more important things that needed doing, but what were those things?

He was on a mission. Or he was supposed to be. With Hurley and Charlie and Locke! That seemed right. They were supposed to find Sawyer, Kate and Jack. At least they hadn’t left without him. Just thinking about being left behind sort of pissed him off. For weeks, actually more like three months, he’d been kept out of all the action, left behind with the water carriers and wood fetchers while these incompetent clowns did everything in their power to get them all killed .

“Hey, Hurley,” he called out. “Shouldn’t the search party have left already?”
Hurley turned to him with an expression of deep unknowing.

Christ, he doesn’t even know my name. What is my name? For one throat-tightening moment, he didn’t know it himself.

“Dude,” Hurley shouted across the sand, “You’ll have to ask Locke. It’s his mission and he seems to be taking his own sweet time about it.”

“I think he’s on hiatus,” Charlie chirped. “He never calls; he never writes.”

“He’s probably tripping. Loco weed. What kind of hero lets his mind go gaga like that?” The sandy man was just getting fired up about the unfairness of the island pecking order when two ice cold hands seized his red hot shoulders and began to rub. Unbidden tears sprung to his eyes.

“Assholes,” the blonde whispered into his ear. “Locke’s not leaving without us this time. Don’t worry, Nikki’s got your back, baby” she said before digging her nails into his blistered flesh until he whimpered. Nikki instantly withdrew her cold comfort, which stopped the physical pain, but brought on a new punishment.

“Wah, wah, wah,” she whined, mocking his agony.

“Jesus wept for good reason, what’s your excuse, Paulo. Be a man.”

* * * *

“Now cue Nikki to roll her eyes and stomp away,” Iben directed, leaning back in his Aeron chair peering over the tips of his Bruno Magli loafers propped up on the ledge of the view course from which he observed the ant-sized actors on the island sound stage far below. He wondered with some embarrassment if this view was similar to the one God enjoyed, unseen but all-seeing.

“You are a bad boy,” his mother admonished. “But a good writer.”

“More than good. Our boy’s a genius!” Valenzetti said, beaming with paternal pride. “The storyline makes a lot more sense and moves along at a much better pace since you accepted the position of head writer.”

“Not to mention, you’re the best paid scribe in all the lands,” Hamish said as he entered Iben’s elegant offices at Cognisent, Inc.’s ultra-high-tech, super-secret studios. “Didn’t I tell you, you’d thank me later?”

“Every day, bro, I sing your praises.” Iben gave Hamish the high-five.

“This has turned out to be a win, win, win, win all the way around,” Hamish said. “You get the job of a lifetime…of several lifetimes. I get the commission that allows me to concentrate solely on my star client’s career endeavors; your parents get their son back; you get a mom and dad, and,” Hamish reached down to pat the head of the white lab lying at Iben’s feet, “I arrive bearing more good tidings. Because of your great big talent these poor Lost souls will finally be found. ABC has agreed to set an ending date. The mystery will be solved by the end of season five.
“Yeah, I know,” Iben responded, pushing his Prada glasses up the bridge of his nose, “I wrote it into their script. Lost has the biggest audience share of any of Cognisent’s infomercials, but in order to keep ‘em watching, they’ve got to get to the point pretty darn soon.”

“Well, whatever you’re doing, it’s working. ABC particularly wanted to commend you on what you’ve done with the Nikki and Paulo storyline. Fans are loving it!”

“That’s why I invited you all here this morning,” Iben said. “That story’s coming to a climax today that I thought you’d all want to witness.”

Iben turned his attention back to the scene on the beach where the formerly formidable Søren now struggled through Paulo’s trials including the rejection of the once adoring Rachel now surviving on the island as the indomitable Nikki.
“Okay, cue the monster,” Iben whispered into his mic.

Suddenly a thundering mechanical beast awakened in the jungle…

“And action,” Iben ordered his unseen production assistants on the ground.
One by one the palm trees crashed to the ground as the monster approached the beach. Paulo turned from the receding figure of his lost love Nikki, and toward the terrible sound.

“Time for his close up,” Iben said.

Paulo’s face loomed large. His raven locks matted with sand, his Viking cheekbones lined with sweat and tears, his once-lush eyelashes mere stubs surrounding sodden red sockets, his growing horror revealed with each monstrous footstep until just before the monster emerges Paulo paralyzed with terror begins screaming like a little girl.

“Cut,” Iben said. “That’s a wrap.”

“What? We don’t get to watch the monster eat him,” Hamish said despondently, with murmurs of dismay coming from Candace, Enzo and Tarelton, too.

“Nah, in the next scene it turns to smoke and fades away,” Iben explained. “Hey, guys, I’m not a killer. You’re not killers.”

“He’s a killer! He laid a trap for his own team at the Hanso Foundation,” Dr. Apollo reminded him.

“Maybe so; maybe no. Nonetheless, Iben Powned is one of the good guys, and even though he may not know my name, deep in his own heart of hearts Søren will know what Iben Powned means.”

“Iben Powned,” Hamish muttered.

“Iben Powned,” his parents repeated.

Then Tarelton rose to his four feet and spoke, “Iben Powned.”

Far below on the sun drenched sands, Paulo looked up into the smoky eye of the island, and what he saw was beautiful, and the voices in his head spoke nothing but the truth: “Iben Powned. Iben Powned. Iben Powned.”

Epilogue: Ogdy’s Lodgepole

2007-01-26T21:27:00.000-08:00

Waves of Shadow

Fog like a wave of shadowy umbra rises from the mist as if on dragonfly wings. A slender fragile vapor and a tenuous spray of transparent haze lies in thin fibrous sheets a handbreadth over the brackish murky water. Something else rises from within the depths of the river, which smells like a thousand years of decayed plant matter and lifeless animal remains. There is an eerie, otherworld silence over the entire region which is more noticeable closer to the water. The waves themselves muffle up against the wooden dock like a child against a father’s leg. There is no doubt that disturbances are not tolerated here. Four great rivers converged at this point into a great still marsh but there is no movement of life here. The sky is absent of birds and insects and no creature comes here to drink. Should you stand on its ill-fated shore and look across it you would not see the other side but you would see an infinite layer of shadowy vapor that held no perspective and which infinity cannot cipher.

On this river floats the most un-seaworthy vessel ever built by man or beast or alien. This small barque is so ancient that the memory of its construction has not been thought of for millennia. The wood of this boat is so dry and fragile that the slightest of waves could have broken it into pieces. Yet, some magic keeps it intact and sound and afloat. The port and starboard faces of the exterior of the boat are scarred and scraped, as if huge claws have tried to drag it down to the bottom. In the open ocean mariners for centuries have expected to see the occasional seagull come to catch a curious glimpse with the hope of a dropped morsel or the churning up a dead fish. This boat, however, has a sinister following of the scrawniest, disease-ridden ravens and crows ever born. Their feathers are thin and mired in garbage and feces and the birds exuded a disgusting odor all their own that is set apart from the stench of the river.

Literature has generally been unkind to the most famous of the four particular rivers here but had you looked into the depths of this fluid the agony of millions of dead, and even some of the undead, would be gazing back; their shrieks of horror and pain setting the mood and measuring their suffering. Their pleas for mercy would tear even the coldest of hearts. And then, and only then, might you truly understand the unkindness… and the scratches on the sides of the boat. This shadow world that Dante witnessed is crossed daily by Charon.

The shadow creature who piloted this boat was, by far, the strangest of all creatures. Part shadow, part cowl and part skeleton it was difficult to look directly at it. If you did, you would notice that he shimmered in his shadow and looked non-corporeal and miasmal and the simplest movements on his part would leave your eye grasping with nothing to hold onto. He wore a robe with a cowling, his face buried deep within the folds of his hood, and he swayed back and forth in the bottom of the boat in tune with the waves beneath the shriveled wood under his feet. Underneath the cowling was a cantankerous skinny daemon in the guise of a decrepit winged old man holding a double hammer in his hand. Around his skeletal wrist he wore an ancient bracelet with an icon from the I Ching stamped into its copper face. His eyes were empty of color and all humanity had evacuated his presence long ago. His was a dark soul.

One day Charon made his way to the shore and was confronted by a man with great courage and steely nerve for he stood as if he would be immune to the courses of nature and to the only outcome that the boatman had ever known.

“Did you bring the coin?” asked the boatman in a voice that heaved over with stagnant water and swamp weed. “An obolus for your thoughts”, he grinned.

“We have an arrangement,” declared the fearless man.

“Your arrangement was with another and not I. Everyone must come this way with me… there are no exceptions!”

“I wish to travel like the Heroes of yore!” he exclaimed.

“Your father awaits you…” growled the boatman to Ethan Rom.

Waves of Light

Looking up into the night sky and the layered conflagration falling from it the shaman understood that the tribal leader would soon be seeking him out. He measured his responses beforehand because he knew what a superstitious creature he was. He knew that what he was seeing was not a conjured night sky apparition and was certainly not associated with any gods or angels but it would be impossible to tell that to the tribe. Exactly what the fire in the sky was, he had yet to identify but he knew from the looks of it that it was some physical manifestation and not the gods expressing their anger. The tribe, however, expected superstition so he practiced his best speech about thunderstones and bolts of fire from god. He rolled his desiccated eagle bones and sighed.

Meanwhile his neighbors were in a panic and the only recourse they felt they had was to sacrifice all the young virgins of the tribe. Their screams as they were pushed into the mouth of a volcano could be heard for miles.

A little further away another group watched the movement of the wave of fire in the sky and recorded it. Their chiseled stones would tell others of this phenomenon four thousand years into the future.

At the same time, 3,000 miles away a group of islanders trained their telescopes at the night sky and calculated the odds of impact. Could this be another dinosaur killer? Many scholarly heads bent down to work on an answer.

****

Out beyond the star named Sol a millennium-old war of natural forces has just concluded. The loser spins without control back towards the pull of this star in a great ribbon-like stream of debris. As it journeys near the star a trail of comet dust and fine particles of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen burn off and remain in solar orbit. A stream is formed by the drag of cooking water vapor. Comet ice evaporates when it approaches the neighborhood of intense heat near the star. The remaining particles of oxygen, iron, silicon, magnesium and aluminum float out just beyond the gravitation pull of the sun as it moves away in its ever-revolving pilgrimage. The earth’s own orbit brings it ever closer to the path of the wave.

But before the earth can pass into its rubble-strewn tail the moon flitters through the wave like a fly to an electric bug zapper. Silent plumes of floating dust pop into existence all over the surface leaving behind craters from as small as a pinhead or a grain of sand to the size of baseballs. They are moving at 30,000 mindless miles per hour. And the dark side of Luna is pummeled with superheated motes.

As the earth orbits the sun on its infinite course, it passes through the tendril-like debris field spread out in a great wave across its path. When they plow through the atmosphere they are heated to more than 3,000 degrees, and they glow with an intensity that matches phosphor at midnight. Friction does not heat the meteor. Rather the meteor compresses air in front of it and the air heats up, in turn, boiling the elements of the meteor. The intense heat vaporizes most of the medium sized pieces, creating shooting stars. The larger pieces splatter, causing a bright fireball, and an explosion, which can be heard 30 miles away. Small bits burn up in the atmosphere, creating dramatic showers of illumination. A heavy wall of fire streaks through the sky, suggesting that a piece has entered the atmosphere at an oblique angle. Exploding in the oxygen rich atmosphere it sends out a hot wind and a thunderous echo that shakes the ground like an earthquake. There is a faint buzzing just beyond the realm of the audible. Small particles that have been blown into the atmosphere light the night sky. The “earth grazers” are both beautiful and prolific in the dry, clear air and there is an unusual lunar haze rarely witnessed. The train glows in bright colors like some Fourth of July Aurora Borealis. Gold-ochre, emerald and indigo sheets of floating ash appear gauze-like overhead.

Extraterrestrial objects hit the ground and blast out craters many times their size. Craters form much as they would on the moon or any other rocky planet. Smaller objects create simple, bowl-shaped craters. Larger impacts cause a rebound that creates a central peak; slipping along the rim which forms terraces. The largest impacts form basins in which multiple rebounds form several inner peaks. The air fills with steaming meteoroid dust particles and the debris trail falls upon the earth like a blanket.

And the sky is full of falling fire, lavender and loud.

****