Chapter 05: Revelations

Kyle and Kathleen are enjoying the last of a large pepperoni and Italian sausage pizza. The house is now pretty much back in order as they worked hard on cleaning up the mess made by Kyle’s Aunt Lucille while waiting for the pizza to be delivered. There were a few items which were set aside to be repaired or replaced, preferably at Lucille’s expense, but the rest of the house is now satisfactory, in Kyle’s opinion.

Kathleen starts toward the refrigerator and asks, “I’m going to get another beer. Do you want one too?”

“Sure, but let’s go to Jonas’ study to drink them. I’ve some things I need to discuss with you.”

She looks at his face, and sees his apprehension. Concerned, she replies, “OK, but this sounds ominous.”

“I wouldn’t call it ominous, but it’s definitely not what you’ll be expecting.”

“Well, I’ve known you too long to suspect you’re a girl pretending to be a boy. Hopefully it won’t be that bad.”

“I hope not, too.”

The couple walk, hand in hand, through Jonas’ office and into his study. The room is a delightful vision of soft earth tones and rich handcrafted wood. There are no windows in the room, but full length gold drapes hanging in the gaps between the bookshelves create a contrast with the mahogany bookshelves and the polished dark oak floors. The drapes also accentuate several paintings of medieval country scenes and makes them seem like windows to another time and place.

A rust, red, and gold Persian Rug accentuates the room’s center while a mahogany Chippendale sofa sits near the door. The silk upholstery’s pattern of various styles and sizes of flowers is a lovely blending of soft maroon, rust, soft pinks, tans, and pale greens. The rich mahogany coffee table in front of it is simple, yet elegant. On the other side of the rug there’s a matching lamp table with a chair on each side of it. One chair is a Chippendale wing-back covered in a soft rough leather with a buckskin appearance. The other is a padded Martha Washington style with a high, but not straight, back; it’s covered with silk in shades of the same colors as the others. The room is comfortable, yet it has a look of simple elegance and luxury.

Kyle leads Kathleen to the two chairs and offers her the one with the silk upholstery while he sits in the leather one, after adjusting it to be able to look one another in the face. Pensively KK says, “Kyle, you’re beginning to worry me.”

“Sweetheart, before we talk I need you to promise me this talk must remain just between the two of us and, unless I initiate it in a conversation with another, it must remain that way forever. Can you promise me that?”

“Before I make you such a promise I need to know if this involves something highly illegal, like murder?”

“Not on this Earth, and even then, I wouldn’t call it murder.”

“Kyle, if it was anyone but you, and if it was any other circumstance leading up to why we’re in this room right now, I’d suspect someone was setting me up for a joke. But you’re being perfectly serious.”

“Sweetheart, I am serious. I am as serious as I am about wanting to marry you,” he says looking directly into her eyes.

“Then I promise to keep my mouth shut. I won’t promise to believe you, but I will promise to listen, and to keep silent.”

“OK, good enough. Jonas had a secret life. A secret life which he maintained for over thirty years. In addition, for the past four years I’ve been a part of that secret life. This morning is the first time in those four years I didn’t go with him on his bi-weekly journey. A journey to another place and time.”

“But I usually saw you at the shop on Saturdays?”

“As strange as this sounds the way it works is: no matter how long we’re in this other place only fifteen minutes passes here on Earth.”

“What did you do there?”

“In my case I was called a Companion. On the planet Chaos I was like a squire to Jonas. I cooked, cared for the horses, cleaned weapons, and carried messages. I wasn’t allowed to fight in any manner, except to defend myself. On the planet Crossroads I mostly relaxed and studied. I was also taught, by Jonas’ Caretaker, concerning many ways to please a woman.”

“Kyle, you’re going to have to be patient with me on this. At the same time, do you realize your aunt used the words crossroads and chaos in her little tirade this evening?”

“No, I was too upset to pay a lot of attention to her words.”

“Well, for someone who wasn’t paying attention you sure did a good job of dealing with that woman. I heard her use the word chaos just before I entered the room the first time. Something about the house falling in around you in chaos. When she started saying she had to have this house, only to suddenly back-peddle and say it had been a dream of hers for years to live in this house. She claimed it represented the crossroads of her life. I picked up on both words because they didn’t seem to fit the sentence structure.”

“You’re right. Why would she have done that?”

“It sounds like she was testing you in some way, to see if she struck a nerve. Does that make sense?”

Kyle thoughtfully responds, “Yes, it does. It also raises another question. She now lives in a home three or four times as nice as this. Why would she have spent years dreaming of having this place? She has supported some rather flaky extreme right-wing causes, but I can’t imagine how that could affect us. What struck me this evening was she didn’t act like it was a desire that would break her heart should she not get the house. Instead, she seemed desperate to get possession of this house, or at least, to get me out of it temporarily. What’s more confusing is how she could have known about Chaos and Crossroads?”

While still pondering this new information about his aunt Kyle walks to the safe and says, “Considering everything that’s happened today I probably need to check to see if Jonas left me any notes or anything.”

“I take it you lied to us all, including the police, about another safe.”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly?”

Kyle responded, “Watch what happens.”

Like most small wall safes the door is round and positioned in the middle of a much larger metal plate. Kyle closes the small round door and spins the dial, locking it. Then he moves the outer ring of the little safe ninety degrees to the left. Pushing the dial inward he enters a new combination. When he finishes with the combination and turns the little handle the entire metal plate opens, leaving the smaller safe intact. “It’s a safe within a safe,” he explains.

An excited KK exclaims, “Ingenious! I’m impressed. That’s so neat. Who would have imagined such a thing?”

Looking inside Kyle sees there are several items he’s never seen. He reaches in and pulls out four notebooks in Jonas’ handwriting. They’re labeled The Attempted Trap, The Coming Battle for Shiloh, Plans for the Defense of Shiloh, and The Role of Shiloh in the Coming War. There are also some maps. A smaller, unbound group of handwritten sheets are stapled together with the title page: Notes to Kyle if something should happen to me. Reaching in a second time he finds two bound booklets titled: A Guide for Companions and A Guide for Heroes. Kyle sets it all on the table in front of Kathleen while saying, “Sweetheart, this was all put here today after Jonas returned from Crossroads.”

“You really are being serious and this far-fetched story is beginning to take on sinister connotations.”

“KK, I’m serious. Serious enough to cause me to suspect Jonas might have been murdered. It’s also serious enough to force me to sleep with a gun beside me tonight. Now, because of the titles of some of these journals I’m beginning to suspect it’s far more sinister than I originally believed. Therefore, on Monday I’ll have a security system installed, which is something I’ve begged Jonas to do for four years.”

“Then, my love,” KK responds, “you better start at the top. It sounds like it’s going to be a long night.”

“KK, I don’t know how much I can cover in one session, but I’ll at least try to cover the basics. There are four planets, Earth, Crossroads, Cassandra, and Chaos. Besides our Earth I don’t have any idea of where the other planets are, or even if they’re in this dimension or space-time continuum.

“Crossroads is the link between the other three. It has a staff of people from the planet Cassandra to support its operation, but I don’t think anything in the place is actually Cassandran technology. In fact, the controlling authority is most likely a computer. The one thing I do know is their non-military technology is greater than anything I’ve ever seen in a SciFi movie or TV show.”

“In what way?”

“You tell the computer what you want and it just appears like magic. It doesn’t matter if it’s food, furniture, or even clothes. In addition, their medical technology heals broken bones, stab wounds, poisons, etcetera in a matter of minutes. In contrast, if you already have something wrong, like cancer, it normally won’t deal with that.”

“What about Larry Martin?”

“That was part of what Jonas was going to discuss with some of the people on Crossroads today. I thought if they couldn’t permanently cure his paralysis he might, at least, be able to live normally on Chaos and impregnate Nadia. They could then return to Earth to bear and raise the child. It might be the way around the Catch Twenty-two problem with the stem cells.”

While slowly nodding KK says, “That could definitely change their lives, and strangely, you’ve caught my interest too. Please tell me more.”

“The key to everything seems to be Cassandra itself. I’ve never seen it, but I understand it was ravaged by a past war that reduced its total population to around a half million. To complicate matters the effects of the wars made their males weak, quick-triggered, and virtually totally impotent, if and when they can get an erection at all.”

“That would definitely make it difficult to rebuild their population.”

“You’re correct, but the problem doesn’t end there. According to what I understand, the eggs of the females have an enzyme coating that usually kills any of the spermatozoa a native male can manage to inject into her. The coup de grace is, if by some freak set of circumstances one of their males does manage to get a female pregnant any male child produced is sterile. Are you following me so far?”

“I’m following the facts, but I’ve no idea what this has to do with us.”

“Just bear with me a little longer, and hopefully I can make it fit together. I don’t know who discovered it, or when, but they’ve learned Cassandran women can easily be impregnated by human males from Earth. What’s even more important, any male children produced are the total opposite of Cassandran males. As a result Cassandra’s population is slowly becoming half human. As you can easily imagine there’s a tremendous desire among Cassandran women for the opportunity to be impregnated by a human male.”