The Daykeeper's Grimoire Page 8

  “That’s great,” Dad says to Uncle Li. “I was a bit under the weather yesterday and didn’t get any work done. I’ve got a project to wrap up and then I’m all yours.”

  “Take your time, Angus,” he replies. “Caity and I can poke around here for days.”

  I finish showing Uncle Li around; he wants to see every inch. Then we go back to my room to talk and I make a fire as he looks around.

  “Your room is very good, no major problems,” he says. “It’s a little big, but the oversized furniture fills the space nicely.”

  “Is the bed placement okay?”

  “Yes, fine. It’s on the solid wall, the dragon wall, and it has a good view of the door, two things that are key to a good bedroom.”

  He stands up and walks over to a window, sticks his head out, and looks both ways. Then he comes back in and sits down. He points to the carved panel and says, “What’s behind there?”

  “Are you psychic?” I ask, dumbfounded.

  He laughs. “Just look out the window, you can see that distance between your back wall and tower is about eighteen feet. These walls can’t be that thick.”

  “Ah. Right.”

  “Not everything is mystery with me,” Uncle Li says with a wink. “So what is it?”

  I take the carved metal key from my desk and lead him over to the panel. I slip the key over the rabbit ears and Uncle Li does not even seem startled when the wall gives away. “This is where it starts to get weird,” I say as I lead him in and turn on the light.

  Uncle Li walks slowly around the room. “What do you know about this?” he asks.

  “Not much. There’s this book I found, by accident, let me get it …” I take the book from under the tabletop and hand it to Uncle Li. “Look at this, and then look at the wall,” I tell him. “It’s a grimoire to some of those symbols.”

  He takes the book, smells it, and looks closely at the binding. Then I hand him the printout of the decoded poems. “It’s a long story how I got these decoded, but this is what I’ve found out so far.”

  Sitting on the fainting couch, he starts to read the poem. Then he looks through the book of symbols. “You decoded this?” he asks as he thumbs through the pages of the book, looking carefully at each symbol and its sound. I watch over his shoulder. He smells like incense.

  “Someone else decoded these ones in the book, but Dad decoded the poem that I printed out.”

  “So your Dad knows?” he asks.

  “Not exactly … he doesn’t really know he decoded all of these, he only knows about one. I kind of tricked him into helping me,” I say.

  “My, you’re a crafty girl.” His eyes sparkle.

  “I’m not proud of it. I feel horrible about it actually, but I have to keep this a secret until I figure out some more stuff.”

  “Well, I’m flattered that you’re telling me about it.”

  “You’re different,” I say. “You can’t punish me and I know you wouldn’t take over.” I don’t want to lay down the whole story about Barend Schlacter yet; I think it might scare him away from helping me, so I angle it a different way. “Do you remember in the seventh grade when I had my first big science project, that thing where I was making batteries? My parents kind of took over and got so involved that the teacher had to have a talk with them.”

  Uncle Li laughs. “I do remember that. They simply can’t help themselves, can they?”

  “Nope. They’re dorks, it’s what they do. And I’m telling you, this is the kind of thing they would totally take over.”

  “I understand completely,” he says as he puts his glasses back in his pocket.

  I point to the title and ask if he knows what As Above, So Below refers to.

  “Yes, of course. It’s a shortened version of ‘That which is above is the same as that which is below’ from The Emerald Tablet.”

  “What’s The Emerald Tablet?” I ask.

  “It’s an ancient book of secret wisdom purportedly written by Hermes Trismegistus.”

  “Secret wisdom? Hermes Trismewhatsit?”

  He says, “Where it comes from isn’t as important as what it means.”

  “Give it to me plain,” I say. “Pretend I’m in third grade.”

  “It means whatever happens on a large scale also happens on a small scale. The theory is man is a part of the universe but he also can be the universe. Just as each strand of DNA contains all the information about your whole body, each individual human mind contains all the information about the whole universe.”

  “So we know everything?” I ask.

  “No,” he shakes his head, “we are everything.”

  I roll my eyes. “How can we ‘be’ everything?”

  “It’s very simple, at the most basic level, everything—you, me, this castle, are all just a bunch of waves. Matter is just dense combinations of waves, vibrations.”

  “That’s just too weird to believe …”

  Uncle Li smiles. “It’s not something you have to believe in. It’s not a religion, it’s science. Physical law. Look at water—it can be a gas, a liquid, or a solid. The form it takes is determined by how fast it’s vibrating. When it’s vibrating slowly, water becomes solid ice, when it’s vibrating really quickly, it’s steam. And when it’s vibrating in between, it’s liquid.”

  I look down at myself. “So I’m vibrating right now?”

  Uncle Li nods his head. “That’s all we are, masses of vibrating energy. Mystics have known this forever. With quantum physics, science is now catching up. Turns out ancient civilizations had a lot of knowledge that we’re just now starting to be able to prove.”

  “So if we’re all just vibrations, then there’s no me or you. We’re all in one big pool?”

  “Exactly,” he replies, “one big pool of possibility. Sometimes particle, sometimes wave, but always connected through chi.”

  “All that from four little words scribbled at the beginning of that book?”

  “Often the least amount of words speak the most profound truths,” he says with a smile.

  “Thanks, Confucius.”

  He chuckles and looks again at the paper with the pieces of the poem. “I think our next step is to find the Flower of Life,” he says.

  “Yeah, and we need to do it quietly and fast—there’s a guy named Tenzo from Princeton coming here to find these spirals.”

  Uncle Li looks surprised. “How does he know about them?”

  “I know this sounds like a dumb thing to do, but when I first saw the spirals, I faxed a rubbing to Justine and she sent it to her grandpa at Princeton who is into that stuff.”

  “So then how many people have seen these?”

  “Just Justine, her Grandpa, and this Tenzo guy, I think.”

  “And they knew what it was?”

  “Well, this Tenzo guy recognized something about it but then when I told Justine’s grandfather that it was nothing, Tenzo agreed, as if to end all examination of it. Then the next thing I know, boom, he tells everyone he’s on a sabbatical and then books a room here.”

  “I can stay for a couple of weeks,” he says. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  I sigh and look up so he won’t see me tearing up. “It means so much to have you here.”

  “I know, Caity,” he says as he picks up the paper with the decoded messages on it. He folds it four or five times and then puts it in his pocket with his reading glasses.

  “Well, if I start now I can probably get another couple of spirals decoded today.”

  “Excellent. I have some work to do for your father; let’s pick this up again in later,” he says as he makes his way to the door.

  I check my mail and see a message marked urgent from Justine—it says to call her cell phone, ASAP, any time of day or night.

  My heart sinks. Has Barend Schlacter gotten to her, too?

  While Justine’s phone rings, I do the math and realize it’s the middle of the night there. Justine answers groggily.

  “Hey J, it�
�s Caity.”

  “Oh, hi,” she says, coming out of sleep. “I’m so glad you called.”

  “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  I hear her covers rustling as she sits up to talk. “I’m fine. I just had the weirdest day—”

  “What? What happened?”

  “So I went in to the Transamerica Pyramid building with the whole messenger getup like you said, and tried to go to the floor that F.R.O. is on. They have the whole floor, by the way, and it’s restricted access, so you have to have a special key to get out of the elevator there.”

  “So you couldn’t even get in?”

  “No, I didn’t see their offices, but I followed two people who worked there.”

  “How did you know they worked there?”

  “Well, it was around lunchtime so I waited on the floor below theirs. I watched for the elevator to stop on the F.R.O. floor, and when it did I punched the button so it would stop to get me. Then I got on the elevator with the people it had just picked up.”

  “Smart! Who were they?”

  “Two older men. Suits, ties, pale skin like they live under rocks. They pretended not to know each other, but once they got out they kept walking together so I followed them.”

  “You are such a great spy!”

  “I know, I totally want to be a P.I. now. It was perfect because I even had a change of clothes in my bag—I didn’t want to have to wear those bike shorts any more than I had to …”

  “Where did they go?”

  “They walked over to China Palace for lunch. After they went in, I ran across the street to the coffee shop and changed clothes, then went in for lunch myself.”

  “Is China Palace the one with the really high booths?”

  “Exactly. I sat in the booth next to theirs and eavesdropped as much as I could. Some other guy had joined them, but I never got to see him; I had to be careful that they never saw me.”

  “You don’t know who the other guy was?”

  “They called him Tremblay. I got the feeling that he’d been away for a long time and was coming back to work with them. They toasted to having Tremblay back at HQ.”

  “Did he have a German accent?” I ask, wondering if it could be Barend Schlacter using a different name.

  “No, Canadian. You know how they say ‘aboot’ instead of ‘about’ and end every sentence with ‘eh’?”

  “What did they talk about?”

  “They started by asking about the progress on the Northwest Passage, that waterway above Canada that hooks up Asia and Europe. It’s been frozen forever and is starting to thaw out.”

  “And?” I ask. Like a waterway in Canada has anything to do with me.

  “What I read said that this thawing is a super-bad thing, but these guys were all excited saying how great it is that in just a few years it will make the Northwest Passage totally usable. They laughed about how with the billions they’ll make on shipping stuff through there instead of going all the way down through the Panama Canal, they could make a freezer the size of Wyoming for polar bears.”

  “Strange.”

  “Then the new guy starts asking about Project Khymatos and they say it’s obviously working really well, that they’re going to have the biggest U.S. exposure yet with all the fighter jets doing their demonstrations over millions of people on the 4th of July.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You know those white lines in the sky that come from airplanes? Well, supposedly some of those are really exhaust from the airplanes, but conspiracy freaks think most of them are metals and chemicals that are being sprayed over us.”

  “Gross. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, there’s tons of theories on the Internet. But the part that really freaked me out was when Tremblay asked how they are protecting themselves and their families, and the two guys say they have master filtration systems at the Pyramid and at their homes.”

  “The Pyramid meaning the Transamerica building?”

  “Right, they call it the Pyramid. Then they talked about not going outside much, and how their home filtration systems help protect their families but doesn’t totally stop exposure. Then Tremblay laughed and said, ‘Like the rest, I guess it makes them a lot easier to control, eh?’”

  “So, you think that what they spray controls us somehow?”

  “That’s what it sounded like.”

  “There’s just no way,” I say. “You can’t just hire planes to spray people with chemicals.”

  “I know it seems like a stretch, but these guys were totally serious.”

  “Did they talk about anything else?”

  “Then they started talking about HAARP.”

  “Wait—I’ve heard of HAARP,” I say recollecting the name. “Haven’t we heard of HAARP?”

  “Sixth grade, Mr. Mattson was obsessed with it. It’s that weird electrical station the government built in Alaska. The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program.”

  “That’s right! He said they’re controlling weather and earthquakes and hurricanes with it!”

  “Exactly,” Justine says. “I did some more research on it when I got back and it’s definitely creepy.”

  “But what did these guys say about it?”

  “I didn’t catch the whole thing, but it’s something about using the ‘Planetary Defense Shield’ that everyone believes is to protect us from nuclear weapons to block something else.”

  “What I don’t get is why anyone in the Fraternitas would be interested in me. What possible tie could there be?”

  “I don’t know. These guys were talking about stuff that happens on a huge scale. No offense, because I think you’re really interesting, but I don’t know why someone who works with this big creepy company would think you’re worth flying to the other side of the world to scare.”

  “I don’t either. Too weird,” I say, still trying to place myself in this puzzle. “But hey, thanks for your help. That was huge.”

  “Anytime you need me to spy on anyone, I’m totally up for it.”

  “You’re the best. Think you can fall back to sleep?”

  “I’m halfway there. I’ll email you tomorrow.”

  I stay in my room for the rest of the day, processing what Uncle Li was explaining and Googling all the stuff Justine told me about. There is so much information out there about chemtrails and HAARP and the Northwest Passage and it’s all so terrifying.

  I’m having trouble reconciling these two worlds—the world of energy and vibration and the world of corruption and control. I can’t help wondering if the Fraternitas is using this ancient knowledge that Uncle Li was talking about to manipulate us. Is it possible that people would be so driven by greed and power? Is it possible that everything we know to be true is just an elaborate mirage?

  After too much time in the labyrinth that is the Internet, I feel like I need to do something where I am in control, so I scan in two more sets of symbols to run while I’m sleeping.

  My dreams are invaded by fighter planes and electrical arrays and fleets ships all crewed by people who look like Barend Schlacter. It’s a relief when my eyes open and it’s light out.

  I check the decoded spirals, which are cryptic as usual. I need to get these to Uncle Li, so I make my way down to the kitchen to see if he’s up. Sure enough, he and Dad are talking with Mrs. Findlay. She has her hands way up inside some large bird, stuffing it for tonight’s dinner. Mr. Papers jumps from his perch to the back of a chair and then directly onto my shoulder; we butt heads and then he takes my earlobe in between his finger and thumb and rubs it absent-mindedly.

  “Hey, Uncle Li, have you seen Mr. Papers do his origami yet?” I ask. I set a few sheets of origami paper in front of Mr. Papers. “Do your stuff, my friend.”

  He starts slowly, as if he’s not sure what to make, and then gets moving. After a couple of minutes he lays down a sheet of blue paper and then gently sets his creation on top of it. It’s a beautiful pink lotus blossom with green stem an
d leaf, floating on the pool of blue paper.

  “How exquisite!” says Uncle Li.

  Dad rubs his chin. “It is quite amazing, isn’t it?”

  “He’s a genius,” I say as Mr. Papers picks up the blue paper and carries it, like a waiter carrying a tray, over to Uncle Li. Then he bows. Uncle Li nods and bows back, whispering something in Chinese.

  “Well, Caity, what do you have planned for the day?” Dad asks.

  “Following Uncle Li around as he checks out the feng shui of the castle.”

  “That okay with you?” Dad asks Uncle Li.

  He brushes some crumbs off his silk jacket and says, “Of course. Caity is actually very helpful. She has an excellent intuitive sense of feng shui principals.”

  “What time does Mom get home?”

  “I’m picking her up at four,” Dad says as he gets up, chugs the rest of his coffee, and then sets the cup in the sink.

  Thank God, I think. I’m so excited to have her back. The whole Barend Schlacter thing has made two days without her seem like two weeks.

  “Aye, and I’m making duck,” says Mrs. Findlay, holding up the bird she was stuffing by its back legs. I can see Uncle Li’s eyes light up. Mrs. Findlay winks at him and he looks down quickly and blushes. I take his hand and lead him out of the kitchen.

  When no one is around, I whisper, “I decoded two more. I need you to look at them.”

  “Great work! Yes, let’s go see.”

  We head upstairs with Mr. Papers in tow. Once in my room with the door closed, I pull out a printout of the two decoded spirals. He puts on his glasses and then reads out loud.

  This birth may come like a storm or a dove

  The outcome lies in how much we can love

  Like gravity, love is a force of great might

  True power comes when we connect and unite

  Into arcane old knowledge you must delve

  To find the secret to twenty-twelve

  The oldest myths, the oldest sages