Unveiled

“Looks like we’re dealing with two perps—one male, one female,” Sergeant Frank Albertson speculated, flexing his surgically repaired right knee. “I didn’t really get a clean look at the female before they jumped the fence…white dress, dark hair, that’s about it... but the male was definitely Caucasian: long hair, blondish, average build. And they were wearing fancy clothes, Ty… ya think this was just a prank?”

“I don’t know, Frankie, this is some crazy shit right here. Where’s the joke?” Lieutenant Tyrone Keats gestured at the pentagram drawn on the pale tile floor in what had to be blood.

“Maybe some kind of cult then? It could have been the perps that made that, but I don’t know about all this.” Albertson pointed up at the wall, illuminated by two floodlights mounted on floor stands in the opposite corners of the room. The wall was a veritable collage of notes, formulas, sketches, scriptures, photos and clippings. Near the center of the wall hung a plain sheet of paper asking in loud, red handwriting:

WHAT IS THE VEIL???

“The Veil…” Albertson read aloud. “What the hell?”

It wasn’t often that the Pasadena Police Department investigated anything worse than a cocaine bust, so despite the late hour, the veteran cop found his interest piqued.

“HQ says the house belongs to a Hans Tor-gin-sen or something,” said Keats. “A former prof up at Caltech. They’ve tried his listed phone numbers. No response.”

“Hmm…” Albertson paced back toward the desk in which they’d found the handgun. “So, they break into a professor’s house in dress clothes, open a hidden compartment in his desk, but leave the gun, then have some satanic ritual?”

“Could be… We’ll prolly never know unless we see the security cam footage.” Keats pointed up at the camera mounted behind the floodlights.

“Need a warrant for that,” Albertson reminded his superior, just to show that he knew the rules.

“Well let’s wrap it up here and go talk to the neighbor that called it in.” the former marine growled.

“We’ve got them on breaking and entering at least,” Albertson thought out loud.

“We ain’t got ‘em on shit ‘til we actually got ‘em,” the swarthy officer snapped. And you let them get away, was the implication. Albertson kept his mouth shut, following Keats out the front door of the house. He glanced at his watch. 1:18 am. Still almost four hours left on his shift. He was already thinking of his recliner, a breakfast burrito, and a couple of Vicodin.

Keats’s radio blared as they reached the patrol car and he responded with his shoulder-mounted microphone.

“Keats here. Whatcha got for me, Heather?”

“Something from the Interpol database. Over.”

“Interpol?”

“Missing persons report filed back in June for Hans Torgrimsson. Over.”

“Are you telling me the owner of the house has been missing for almost five months, and we haven’t been investigating this?”

“Affirmative,” the businesslike tenor came back. “No way for us to investigate, sir. This report was filed in Norway.”

∞ ∞ ∞

The Uber app’s navigation instructions were silenced by an incoming call just as Ramniwas Sachdeva was looking for his turn off Colorado Boulevard.

“Bhenchod!” he cursed in Hindi, swerving left into the turning lane. He recognized the number—another call from his landlord. He declined it, restoring the onscreen map of Pasadena and gunning his Camry left through the oncoming headlight beams, into the quiet illumination of the hotel parking lot. His head throbbed. Reflexively, he reached for his stash of Gutkha above the visor. His free hand located the yellow packet held to the visor by a rubber band. He tugged it loose and a wallet-sized photo came down with it. It was his fiancée, Devi, her dark eyes shining, marigolds in her hair. Shame radiated through his core as he brought the car to a halt in the passenger pickup lane. He had promised her he would quit using the potent blend of nicotine, spices, and carcinogenic chemicals that was banned here in the States, but enduringly popular back home.

Home… this was supposed to be our new home, he told himself, recalling their last night together. I’ll finish my software engineering degree, get a high-paying job with visa sponsorship, and then I’ll come back for you. I promise. Ram scoffed at the memory, stuffing the picture in his shirt pocket, tearing open the Gutkha packet, and tilting it back into his mouth. Another broken promise. Put it on my tab!

The last two years had been nothing but a revolving door of part-time jobs, overdue bills, unpayable tuition, and eviction notices. When had the American Dream become the American nightmare? Oh well, he thought. None of it would matter if he couldn’t renew his visa. But, like everything in this country, that cost money. So, it was looking like deportation for him come the new year. He would have left already, except that would make him a failure in Devi’s parents’ eyes. They weren’t so keen on him anyway. A pretty girl like Devi deserved better than an Uber driver—even Ram couldn’t argue with that.

A sharp knock on the opposite window made him flinch, forcing him back to his present reality. A sharply dressed young man with long blonde hair waved at him, joined by a svelte young lady in a white dress. He waved them in, unlocking the doors.

“Ramniwas, is it?” the male passenger greeted. “How you doing, man?”

“Doing well!” he lied.

∞ ∞ ∞

Dane rose, his feet burning from the hard landing, and looked back at the tall wooden fence he’d just cleared. It wouldn’t stop bullets, that’s for sure, but the cops wouldn’t shoot. They wouldn’t jump the fence either—not to chase two trespassers.

Zahara appeared at his side, still carrying the items they’d just “borrowed” from Doctor Torgrimsson’s house.

“Let’s go!” she hissed, handing him the black notebook and iPad but hanging on to the bundle of cash as they trotted briskly under moonlight across some stranger’s back lawn. They headed directly for a side gate that opened on the driveway, but as they reached the back deck, a voice sounded.

“Who the hell are you two?”

They froze. Dane glanced behind and to his right and found himself looking at a thoroughly confused middle-aged man sitting in a hot tub with two younger women. Both women were topless.

“Wow, this looks like fun!” Dane improvised as best he could. “Sorry for the intrusion — Don’t mind us, just passing through…” He resumed walking, steering Zahara with his free hand toward the side gate. She waved at them awkwardly as they trotted past. They were through the gate before the stunned man could formulate a cogent response. No one followed.

“Oh my god! I can’t believe that just happened,” Zahara huffed as they half-jogged down the suburban sidewalk in their eveningwear. Dane caught a smile of exhilaration in her turquoise eyes.

“Which part?” He looked down at the faded black notebook in his hand, craving and fearing the secrets its pages contained. Dane pushed back sweat-dampened hair from his face, still trying to process what they’d just seen. Zahara’s instincts had been correct: Doctor Torgrimsson’s breakthrough involved much more than positronics.

“His wall...all those clippings…” Zahara thought aloud. “He must have made some connection between astrophysics and mythology…between science and religion. But what?”

“Well, I’m guessing the answer is in one of these.” He held up the notebook and iPad. “We just have to follow the breadcrumbs.”

But Dane Skaldsmark didn’t like where these breadcrumbs seemed to be leading. They’d started the evening at the JPL-NASA banquet back at the hotel, hobnobbing with his fellow physicists. That was the ostensible reason they’d flown out to California from Houston—he and his former therapist, Dr. Zahara Darius. Now, here they were, playing James Bond. Their lives had been derailed by—and entangled with—the enigmatic disappearance of Dr. Hans Torgrimsson. Dane couldn’t explain the headlong dive they’d taken down this rabbit hole. Like Zahara had said in their last session, there seemed to be other forces that physics couldn’t explain guiding their steps lately. Like a karmic undertow dragging them towards…what?

“The Veil…” Zahara said, right on cue. “Whatever it is, he found it, and I think he wanted us to find it too.”

A sudden chill grazed Dane’s spine. He knew she was right.

∞ ∞ ∞

Where to begin?

Doctor Hans Torgrimsson stared at his own cadaverous face on the iPad screen, smoothing back his thinning white hair. When was the last time he’d eaten or slept? It didn’t matter, he told himself. He wouldn’t need this bag of bones for much longer anyway. Just long enough to record this final message, hop a one-way flight back to Norway, and prepare the stasis module for departure.

But where to begin?

He flipped through the pages of meticulous notes in his black book. Perhaps he would begin with his accidental discovery of the universal source of dark matter.

No…Dark matter was just the path…it’s where the path leads that’s important.

“It leads to the afterlife.” Torgrimsson muttered, scratching his gray beard. “We’ve known it all along. It’s in all our oldest stories … Adam and Eve… the creation myths…” He flipped back to a page of hand-drawn symbols, holding it up to the iPad camera. “See?” he rehearsed, “the truth is everywhere – the infinity symbol, Egyptian ankh, yin-yang, dharmachakra, vegvisir…they all point to the same thing: the planes beyond the Veil, counterbalancing our own world. Entropy versus energy, chaos versus order, antimatter versus matter…”

The old professor grinned at himself on the iPad screen. He knew the modern world wasn’t ready to hear this yet. But maybe they didn’t need to be—not all of them. Whoever was meant to follow his footsteps, whoever finds this, they’d be ready. And they’d pass the torch.

Just keep it simple. Tell them the answer.

With deep sigh and a trembling finger, Dr. Torgrimsson tapped RECORD.

“Consciousness is the Veil…”

∞ ∞ ∞

To Zahara, the schematic drawing looked like a coffin. But the notes in the margins suggested it was a life-support system. She lowered the black book as the Uber turned into the hotel parking lot.

“Why would a renowned astrophysicist design a biological preservation system?” she questioned.

“Same reason a renowned astrophysicist would be studying ancient religious symbols.” Dane shrugged. “Because he’s batshit.”

“Psh…You know he wasn’t though.”

“Yeah, I know…” Dane conceded. “That’s the problem.” Dane turned off his phone flashlight as the car came to a halt. Zahara flipped pages, glaring down at the interlacing loops of a hand-drawn infinity symbol. It looked like the page had once been deliberately folded such that a crease bisected the two loops. For no clear reason, the image made the tiny hairs on her neck stand up.

What is the Veil?

The thought echoed in her mind as Dane thanked the driver and opened the door. Zahara tucked the black book under her arm and looked down at the stack of cash in her lap; twenty-thousand dollars that wasn’t hers. Why had she taken it in the first place? She was no criminal. Different forces were guiding their steps now—hers and Dane’s. They’d both felt it. With an overmastering intuition, she was certain Dr. Torgrimsson had left the money on purpose, along with the notebook and the iPad. They were a trail of breadcrumbs, beckoning them down the rabbit hole after him.

Without a second thought, Zahara placed the cash on the console and stepped out of the car. Through the open window, she said to the astonished driver, “That’s for you, Ramniwas. Use it. Be someone… And never quit.”

Then, in a cool voice belied by her warm eyes she added, “until we meet again. In this life or the next.”