CheapLit: Free ebook sample of "Where's Voldemort?" by Kevin Dann (powered by Smashwords)

Coming out into the street from the dark theater, he realized that he’d forgotten to bring Rosie’s detachable headlight. He prided himself on his confidence that no one would ever try to steal her, since her head tube, seat tube, bell, and handlebar tape were all bright pink. Even though she sported quick release hubs, he only used a cable and lightweight brass U-Haul padlock, often just looped round the frame, leaving the wheels at risk. Every time he came out and found Rosie waiting for him, with all her parts intact, his heart leapt with joy. The one concession he made to security was that headlight, whose plastic handlebar mount allowed it to slip off with a mere pinch of the rear tab.

He was headed home to Brooklyn by way of the East River Bikeway, which was treacherous enough during the day – homeless men and women pushing shopping cart shanties; surf rod-wielding fishermen with ear buds who couldn’t hear his bell as they leaned back to cast; old Chinese women doing tai chi smack in the middle of the bike lane. At night it was much worse. The asphalt surface of the path in many places was broken and dotted with occasional patches of sand and gravel washed into the path by the latest downpour. On the northernmost stretch, between 38^th and 34^th Streets, a genteel trellised wisteria arbor always seemed to harbor junkies and drunks who would stumble suddenly out of the shadows. Further south, in the East River Park, the hazard was late night strolling lovers; no matter how furiously he rang Rosie’s pink bell, dewy-eyed couples coming toward him never heard it. The flashing headlight worked to warn pedestrians, but it did him no good lying on the counter at home.

It wasn’t actually that he had forgotten it, just that he had planned to be home by dusk. He had ridden to Eyebeam Technology and Art Center on 21^st Street in Chelsea, to attend a Public School class on “Civil Resistance in the 21^st Century.” He’d arrived 10 minutes early, ducked in for a sponge bath in the men’s room washbasin, changed into his red plastic Pravda pants and a clean white shirt, and then discovered that there was no class that evening. As the woman at the reception desk looked it up on the computer, he wondered aloud whether the class had happened August 4^th, 2010, not 2011. For some reason, that date August 4 stuck out in his mind; maybe he had just erred on the year.

“Tomorrow. It’s tomorrow night, August 5^th, at 6 o’clock. If you come early you can see the exhibition.” She pointed to the large “BIORHYTHMS: Music & the Body” display at the end of the lobby. “It closes on Friday.”

“That works out great. I’ve wanted to go see the new Harry Potter movie. Where’s the nearest theater?”

“There are a couple in Chelsea. Here, you can check the show times.”

A young fellow coming through the lobby spoke up in a thick Irish accent. “You should go to the Ziegfeld! It’s the last single-screen movie house in Manhattan, and on opening night a few weeks ago, all 1100 seats were filled with happy Harry Potter fans.”

“Thanks so much for the tip.” He reached out to shake hands. “I’m Daniel Lucas.”

“Conor. I organized this show. Come by tomorrow and I’ll give you a tour.”

“I’d love to. I’m working on a book called 33 1/3. It’s about the 33-year rhythm in human biography. What’s your interest in rhythm?”

“I’m a microbiologist studying cellular rhythmic patterns. And I turn 33 in a couple of months! Should be an interesting conversation.”

Actually, Daniel Lucas wasn’t working on the 33 1/3 book at all. In fact, it was now backburnered behind three other book projects – a history of demonic possession in North America from Salem in 1692 to the latest outbreak of alien abductions; a philosophical reflection on the 9/11 attacks in American memory; and a travel memoir from a recent trip to Germany. There might be a fourth tomorrow if he wasn’t careful. Spending day after day reading and writing about Cotton Mather’s descriptions of the Salem girls’ suffering; the sickening self-righteous sentimentalism centered on the 9/11 Memorial; and travelling back in memory to his walks out on the Zeppelin Field at Nuremberg, conjuring the echoes of Hitler’s speeches, an ugly darkness had settled in to haunt both his thinking and feeling life. It was early August, the sweetest – if sometimes bittersweet – moment of summer, when the newly fledged barn swallows crowded together with their parents on the pier pilings at Fulton Landing, and scarlet cardinal flowers, purple asters, and black-eyed Susans shouted gloriously from a little wet meadow in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Half the city was away on vacation; you could cycle up 6^th Avenue mid-week and notice the lighter traffic. Even the cabbies were happy, despite the August heat.

So, a summer blockbuster seemed like a great way to break up his black psychic clouds. He only went to movies a few times a year, and he’d never seen a Harry Potter film. Nor had he read any of the novels. A dozen years ago, while she was still in college, his daughter had given him Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to read, but he couldn’t make it past the first few chapters. All those alchemical allusions were great, but what was the point really? J. K. Rowling didn’t actually seem to believe in magic. She just used it as a baroque virtual world in which to immerse the reader.

Some friends had recently suggested the film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II. Without saying very much, they hinted that the film was all about love and resurrection. He could use a little resurrecting right now. Always a sucker for a redemption tale, he thought he might redeem his scheduling snafu with a ride up to the Ziegfeld to see the film. The young man at the ticket booth hadn’t blinked when he asked for admission as a senior – a savings of $3.50 – and assured him he would get a good seat.

“You may be the only one there come showtime. The crowds died down two weeks ago.”

Daniel unlocked Rosie as the small audience filed out of the theater. The street’s heat felt good after a couple of hours sitting still in shorts and t-shirt in the freezing air conditioned theater. A night ride was just what he needed to digest all those images. The main reason he hadn’t watched TV in twenty years, and avoided films, was his conviction that the images made by others would crowd out his own, and that their accelerated pace – 24 discrete images every second – penetrated his subtle body, unmistakably speeding up his thoughts and movements. Born with the planet Mercury at his midheaven, there was quicksilver enough already in his being.

The film had been dazzling, but just one image reverberated in his head. It was an aural image, not visual: “Where is he Harry?” He couldn’t recall if it had been Hermione or Ron who had asked the question of the dazed Harry, who at that moment was seeing out of Voldemort’s eyes, so that he instantly knew where Voldemort was. Where’s Voldemort? That was it! That was the key to Daniel’s problem, the catalyst to unlock nearly two years of stasis. He clutched this thought like Harry hanging on to Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem.

Heading east on 54^th Street, a cascade of pictures perfectly matched to the ride came into his mind’s eye. The moment he’d pulled away from the curb, he was Harry swooping on his broomstick through the Room of Requirement. Each stoplight he raced and sometimes ran was the grasp of Fiendfyre in hot pursuit. Rosie was better than a broomstick, at least as humble and obedient a servant, but she conquered land, not air, and land was where this Muggle spent most of his day, like it or not. Night riding in Manhattan was pretty close to flying, but you still had to look out for . . .

THUNK! This wasn’t a pothole, but one of those 6” wide, 4” deep channels that seemed to pockmark all of 54^th Street from 5^th Avenue east. It ran along the side of a square utility access, and in swerving to keep from going over it, he had run the back wheel right into the chunky-bottomed channel, slamming the rim so that he was nearly thrown headlong off Rosie. His silky smooth night ride was now punctuated by an annoying eccentric “thrip, thrip, thrip” that thrummed up through his seat into his butt and then through his whole body. It was like a scratch on a record – regular, rhythmic, and absolutely maddening. He never would have hit the hole if he’d brought that headlight.

Glancing back over his shoulder for a moment, he caught a glimpse of the Chrysler Building’s gleaming stainless steel chevrons. The moist night air turned the whole tower fuzzily hazy, dreamy, absolutely beautiful. Mesmerized, he sailed right over Second Avenue, where he should have turned south, then First Avenue, and suddenly he was braking where 54^th Street came to a dead end in front of a little park hovering above the FDR Drive. It was completely dark, and his eyes were fogged over with sweat, but he knew instantly exactly where he was. He hopped off Rosie, walked her slowly across to the opposite sidewalk, and closed his eyes and said a prayer.

“Grandpa Ira, thank you for watching over me here in New York, where we had so many great times. Thanks for all you gave us. Please help me with my task. I love you.”

Daniel opened his eyes and saw what looked to be the same white 45 Sutton Place South lettering on the same green awning that used to greet his family all those many years ago, whenever they would come in to the city for a visit with Ira – his great uncle, whom he and his siblings had adopted as “Grandpa.”. Ira had died of cancer when Daniel was a freshman in college, the first person in his life whom he loved to have died. It seemed that Rosie had delivered him straight into the scene where Harry’s parents, Dumbledore, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin pledged their love for Harry as he steeled himself to go and face Voldemort, and his own death.

Ever since he had moved to New York City the year before, there had been moments when Daniel had felt Ira’s presence. He said a silent remembrance whenever he passed under Ira’s apartment building as he drove north on the FDR. The 6^th floor window still looked out south toward the UN, and the red neon Pepsi-Cola sign across the East River. Daniel had not had a Pepsi in 30 years, but he loved that sign, whose glow took him right back to the nights he’d stay over at Grandpa Ira’s, sleeping on the pull-out bed in the den, sneaking Ira’s opera glasses to peer out the window at all the other windows on Sutton Place, hoping to see a naked woman, a murder, or some other forbidden thing.

Daniel pedaled up 52^nd Street to First Avenue and rode for half a dozen blocks against the traffic, thinking he would like to see the United Nations Building, as a way to continue thinking about Ira. They had gone there a couple of times; Ira loved to introduce Daniel to the world – whether it was showing him globes and world maps, taking him to museums, or teaching him to always go back and thank the cook in the restaurant where they had eaten. He once asked Daniel if he knew where the word “news” came from, and then, sketching a compass on a cocktail napkin, Ira had underlined the first letter of each of the cardinal directions.

“See, North. East. West. South. ‘NEWS’ comes from all four directions.”

That had been like an act of magic for Daniel. He must have repeated it to others hundreds of times, though he always suspected it was Grandpa Ira’s invention. Somehow this explanation seemed truer than true.

Daniel could not recall when Ira had first taken him to the UN, but he remembered the sense that it was a special place full of people from all over the world, doing important things. In 1965, when he was just nine, Ira – a sales executive at a New York newpaper syndication agency – had taken him on a business trip to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. Ira had coached him on salesmanship, and in each city marched Daniel in to an editor’s office, so that Daniel could try his hand at selling a new comic strip. In DC they had dined at the National Press Club, and the next morning they were scheduled to meet President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s secretary, Liz Carpenter, was an old friend of Ira’s. The audience with the President was cancelled at the last minute, and Daniel remembered that Ira had called him to the window of their downtown DC hotel and pointed to the White House lawn, where a helicopter landed to take the President off to some more important meeting.

Given all that he knew now about the cynical operations of the United Nations; about LBJ’s role in the Kennedy assassination and the Gulf of Tonkin false flag operation; about Operation Mockingbird and the CIA’s infiltration of the American press, it seemed surreal for Daniel to think of himself as an innocent nine-year-old close to American seats of power in those dark years of the American Empire.

The honking horn of a cab next to him brought him out of his reverie. It had pulled up in front of an electronic security gate that led into the UN grounds. A small group of people – men and women who looked like they may have been members of various diplomatic corps – were on the other side. One of the women called out to the cabbie to wait. Daniel felt a strange wave of vertigo pass through him. He recalled stepping through the doors of that low, concave Secretariat building as a child, and immediately being amazed by the sight of people in as varied costumes as the flags in the plaza outside. Along with the usual sea of dark suits, there had been a colorful array of traditional garb – African dashiki, Japanese kimonos, veiled Middle Eastern women. He fully felt the joy that had swept over him at that moment, born out of an intuition that such a gathering of people from all over the world was a thing of beauty, truth, and goodness, a kind of paradisical state.

But the scene in front of him simultaneously produced a feeling of dread, almost of nausea. Something about the woman’s tone of voice when she called out to the cabbie, of the way that the silhouettes carried themselves, and the way in which they spoke to each other, seemed full of cold calculation and cunning. The meeting of these present and past images made Daniel reel. He slipped his right foot out of the toe clip and placed it on the ground, straddling his bike. Feeling grounded again in the present, he suddenly noticed the massive sculpture directly behind the group of figures in the dark. The face of a giant dragon – his mouth open, teeth bared – stared up in terror at a mounted warrior who was thrusting a long lance into his belly. Clearly it was St. George or the Archangel Michael slaying the Beast. Daniel couldn’t recall ever seeing it when he had come here with Grandpa Ira.

Once again, Daniel seemed to have ridden Rosie straight into a scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The sculptured dragon could have been the very one that guarded Bellatrix’s vault and Helga Hufflepuff’s Cup. The mounted knight was Harry, the lance the Sword of Gryffindor. Daniel felt he himself was Harry, armed with his loving memories of Grandpa Ira, just as Harry had gone to meet Voldemort protected by the love of his dead parents.

Daniel set off again up First Avenue, then turned down 38^th Street, and passed under the FDR through a well-lit gate before plunging into total darkness at the beginning of the bike path. The present world situation was the reverse of the UN sculpture and the conclusion of the Harry Potter tales. The Dragon and Voldemort were on the loose, tearing up the planet and its people. In the last week, street protests in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East were met with varying degrees of state violence; in the United States, the same technologies that helped coordinate pro-democracy protests were being put to use to transform peaceful flash mobs into looting “flash robs”; in a new form of urban terrorism called “Knockout King,” teens attacked strangers, attempting to knock them unconscious with a single punch. In Europe and America, a small gang of criminal banksters were playing Knockout King against the sovereignty of nations, and winning. The rising of the Dragon from the Abyss even showed itself in the weather; most of the country had been locked in a horrific heat wave for weeks. Texas was bone dry from the Rio Grande to the Red River and the Mississippi. Volcanoes in Alaska, Hawaii, Chile and Indonesia had erupted, and Mount Etna in Sicily had been spewing lava since late July. The clouds of ash from Iceland’s Grimsvötn volcano were still settling on far-flung points on the earth. Deadly radiation still emanated from the nuclear complex at Fukushima.

Daniel believed that all these catastrophes were merely symptomatic of a much more profound threat to humanity. A whole series of rhythms rippling from different points in the past were coming together and would produce a thousand-year flood, a “perfect storm,” an epic tsunami which only the most spiritually attuned cosmic weather forecasters might predict. Daniel had been hopeful when the first wave of books about 2012 appeared, but had then watched as the debate about the Mayan calendar had degenerated into a classic philosophical food fight, the starry eyed New Agers expecting cosmic kumbaya while the self-satisfied materialists dismissed any apocalyptic expectations as nonsense.

It was obvious that December 21, 2012 would not bring “the end of the world,” but Daniel was sure that he had discovered a sinister secret behind the 2012 mystery. He had come upon a very strange book, which claimed to identify the individual who would become the vessel for the Antichrist. This individual had had three previous incarnations since the time of Christ – each incarnation an arch-villain more evil, treacherous, and powerful than the last. The book’s author only gave the name of the most recent incarnation – Joseph Stalin – supplying general information – a “Roman Emperor” and “member of the Spanish Inquisition” for the other two; Daniel had managed to solve these. By publishing a book proving the reincarnation series based on scientific laws, Daniel intended to enlist his readers to help identify the Antichrist candidate, whom he was sure would be appearing on the scene very soon. The problem now was finding anyone to publish his work; even the metaphysical publishing houses turned his manuscript down, telling him that the work was overly technical for their readers. Tonight Harry Potter had given him a strategy to defeat Voldemort.

The F train’s clackety-clack crossing of the Manhattan Bridge above his head brought him back to earth. This was the best-maintained section of the bike path; just a few weeks ago they had painted new lines dividing pedestrians from cyclists. Coming to Catherine Slip, Daniel turned away from the river to cross Water and Cherry Streets, made a left on Madison and a quick right onto Oliver Street, past the front of the Mariner Baptist and back of St. James the Apostle, and then climbed uphill to Chatham Square proper. He loved the feeling through here, where Chinatown and the old Five Points and the Bowery kind of rolled into one. Slipping through it all late at night with Rosie felt like every magical breaking and entering scene from tonight’s film. Swimming and skipping through the summer night, they were completely unseen, draped in the Cloak of Invisibility.

At the junction of Bowery, East Broadway, St. James Place, Mott Street, Oliver Street, Worth Street, and Park Row, with the statue of the opium-battling Lin Zexu looking on, he dashed through the red light, since there was no automobile traffic allowed down Park Row toward the Correctional Center. He jumped Rosie up onto the sidewalk to avoid the security barriers in the street, then raised up off his seat to get a look ahead, since he was going at a good clip down the sidewalk, with no headlight. Just past the second security booth, there were two concrete posts to navigate, then an immediate 90 degree right turn to come up past the loading dock of the Correctional Center, another 90 turn now to the left, under the creepy bridge between prison blocks and behind the St. Andrew’s Church, then out into the open of the plaza behind the Manhattan Municipal Building. This was his favorite spot. He looked right to see which of the big tiled arches he would slip under to make the two-second dash through the high atrium, up onto the Brooklyn Bridge Promenade entrance, and the climb to the first stone tower of the bridge.

Out of habit he kept ringing the little pink bell, for this was the place where bikes and pedestrians commingled dangerously both day and night. It was late enough in the evening that the mobs of walkers on the bridge had given way to the occasional lovers arm-in-arm, and only a handful of distracted tourist photographers. Pumping uphill toward the tower, he took his hands from the handlebars and placed them on his hips, and sniffed the brackish air off the East River. He glanced up at the night sky, hoping to see Arcturus, then, catching sight of some orange glow off in the south, turned to see Liberty with her torch. A shiver ran up his spine. How was it that fate had delivered him to this intersection of Time and Space, obsessed with the thought that he alone might sound the alarm that Voldemort was here, now?

It was all so accidental, yet completely fated. If the Public School program had been tonight, he might never have gone to see the Harry Potter film. Chances were always 10 to 1 that when he said he wanted to see a film, he’d never go. If he hadn’t missed the turn on First Avenue and found Grandpa Ira’s place; if he hadn’t come smack up to that statue of Michael and the Dragon, he might never have conceived of this crazy conceit, to conceal within a novel the naming of the vehicle of the Antichrist. No one would ever believe him if he tried to tell the story straight. It had to be cloaked as a fiction.

He was on the level stretch that approached the tower on the Brooklyn side, the stretch where the benches invited the most delicious pedestrian lingering, and folks climbed up onto the steel girders to pose for photographs against the lower Manhattan skyline, or the more modest outline of DUMBO. The red digital neon sign atop the Watchtower blinked the time and temperature, so disappointingly prosaic a message from the madly millennialist Jehovah’s Witnesses. Daniel was about to go into his no-hands stance, for the last downhill stretch to the Brooklyn side. He loved to make big swooping motions with his arms through here, mimicking a gushing fountain. But as he stood up onto the pedals, a woman pulled alongside him on the right, then slowly passed him. As she did so, she reached down with her right hand to straighten her skirt, which had hiked up a little too far. She was gorgeous – brown skinned with long dark hair that trailed out behind. He couldn’t tell if she was Italian, Spanish, Mexican. Daniel sped up a bit, catching up with her, and matched his rhythm perfectly to hers.

“What a beautiful night! Coming across this bridge breaks my heart with the beauty.”

“Yes, it’s perfect.” She reached down and tugged at her skirt once more, then turned to glance at him. Her eyes caught the light for a second and then she turned again to face the path ahead.

“Where are you from?”

“Peru. I’m Maria.” She took her right hand off the handlebars and reached it across to him.

“Daniel. God bless you Maria.”

“God bless you Daniel.” And she pulled ahead as he slowed down to dismount at the pedestrian steps to Cadman Plaza.

Who needed a headlight on such a night as this?

Chapter Two: It’s All About Rhythm

“Thou art the Holy Grail.”

Daniel spoke the words inwardly as he swung his arms up over his head, palms facing outward, brought them down to the level of his heart, turned the palms inward and brought them toward himself, then swept back, down, and forward again, this time from below. As he formed this penultimate gesture and phrase, he found – as he always did – that his movements were too fast, and slowed to half the pace for the final lemniscate and the closing words: “Worthy is the Lamb to receive the Book, and to open its seven seals.”

Crossing his arms in front of his chest, so that his fingertips almost touched his clavicle, he felt a sudden warmth on his face, and opened his eyes to see that the rising sun had caught the beveled surface of a glass skyscraper across the East River in lower Manhattan, just a block or two up from where the Peking was docked at Pier 11. The spot where he always came to do his morning prayers, at the top of a granite staircase in Brooklyn Bridge Park, was often perfectly positioned to catch reflections from the buildings across the river. Depending on the season and the time of the morning, it might be any one of a half dozen Wall Street skyscrapers, or the new Gehry Tower, whose carved stainless steel face threw off eccentric reflections throughout the day. Daniel aimed to be at his prayer spot by 7 AM, before most walkers and runners arrived. It was still before 6, so this morning the only people about were a French film crew down on the Fulton Landing dock, using the dawn light against the Manhattan shore as a backdrop for a car commercial.

As he had opened his eyes, a flock of gulls lifted off from the nearby grass lawn, passing just between him and the river, and he could feel his subtle body lift and travel with them for an instant. All his hairs stood up, and he was immediately aware of the chi tingling out of his palms. It seemed to meet the reflected sun in the middle above the river, whose surface was shimmering with overlapping wave patterns. The slow wake of a passing tug drawing a garbage scow was still reflecting off the concrete rip rap sea wall; riding along with the incoming tide, wave patterns arrived from boats further out in the harbor – the Staten Island Ferry, East River Ferry, and a few sport fishing boats. There were occasional calm, glassy patches where you could see the south breeze skipping upriver, leaving tight ripple marks on the surface of the dark water.

Staring at a glassy spot just beyond the seawall, Daniel recalled a dream from last night. He had been in a dingy, cluttered shop, with a row of glass cases on the left. A bearded old man – the proprietor – sat on a stool across from the cases. Daniel recognized the place as a birth registry office, and felt he was there to look for someone’s birth information. Then suddenly he saw that the cases were filled with LPs; it was a record shop. His mind must have punned on “record,” perhaps from thoughts of the 33 1/3 book. Instantly he interpreted the dream as the opening scene of a little book on the 33 1/3 – year rhythm, and saw a page at the back of the book, a note to the reader announcing the newly created “Institute for the Study of Historical Rhythms,” and a solicitation for people to submit biographical anecdotes about important events they had noticed in their lives. The 33 1/3 – year study would be the foundation to study other rhythms – the 12-year Jupiter rhythm, 29.5-year Saturn rhythm, etc.

An NYPD cruiser, its blue light flashing, zipped by, reminding Daniel of last night. When he had walked out to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade with his accordion to serenade the strollers, a police car with its lights flashing had been parked across the middle of the Montague Street entrance, and a pair of patrolmen were standing at different spots along the iron fence. It was the first time that Daniel had ever seen police on the Promenade.

“Our orders are to stay here until the President leaves town,” answered the handsome cop to Daniel’s query about what was up. Turning to look out toward Manhattan, Daniel spotted five police boats patrolling between the Brooklyn Bridge and Governor’s Island, and a pair of helicopters hovering – one above Battery Park, another above the still-rising North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“$71 grand a couple! That’s the ticket price for tonight’s shindig. I bet most of the folks there tonight are with Bloomberg on cutting our pensions. $2 million bucks – that’s what they say he’ll make tonight. That could buy a lotta pensions.”

Since moving to Brooklyn Heights the past spring, Daniel had come to feel that Barack Obama was like an expatriate from the neighborhood, who blew back into town for only the most exclusive parties. Last time was in early May, for an appearance at Ground Zero a few days after the announcement of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Obama had managed to squeeze in at least one fund-raising event on that trip too. Just a few days ago, the Dow had dropped 600 points after the debt ceiling debacle, but Wall Street and other Manhattan coffers were open wide for candidate Obama.

A week had passed since the Where’s Voldemort? inspiration had come to him, and he had yet to write a single word. A cold front had blown through during the night, and after this morning’s run he felt like he was ready to start in. After a shower and oatmeal he would head up to Williamsburg to get that rear wheel fixed, and begin on the novel before afternoon. He wondered if he should go read the DaVinci Code again to steal some tricks for Where’s Voldemort? While he was still teaching, Daniel used to begin his Modern Global History course with a lecture on Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, focusing on how difficult it had been for Leonardo to complete the figures of Jesus and Judas in the fresco.

He chose Leonardo’s Last Supper as the focus because, thanks to Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, most of his students were familiar with the fresco. It was such fun when, just as the bell would ring at the end of his second lecture of the semester, “Dr. D” – as he was known to his students – would pose a solution for why Leonardo had taken twelve years to complete the figures of Jesus and Judas: “Because Leonardo da Vinci was the reincarnation of Judas Isacariot, and the deed of painting The Last Supper was an act of redemption of world historical significance. In painting this scene of Christ and his disciples at the moment when Christ identified who it was that would betray Him, Leonardo was giving to humanity a key to understand the whole of human history, the whole of earth evolution even! We’ll take this up next time we meet.”

Daniel would then pivot on his heels and begin erasing the board, knowing full well that he had delivered a body slam to their psychic solar plexus. Though few had read The DaVinci Code, most had seen the film version of Brown’s novel, and almost all of them – even the Christian students – seriously entertained Brown’s central thesis that the Holy Grail was a bloodline, begun when Mary Magdalene bore Jesus’s children. He loved that at the outset of his course, he could trump the outrageous lie introduced into the world by Dan Brown’s book. Daniel maintained that it was a lie because, though a fiction, Brown framed it with the “facts” of the existence of the two secret brotherhoods, the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei. There was always a noticeable wave of disappointment that passed over his students’ faces when he informed them that the “ancient” Priory of Sion had actually been created by the French fascist Pierre Plantard in 1956 – the year Daniel was born.

Like The DaVinci Code, the Harry Potter novels were an immense help to him in his teaching, for he could count on the fact that about a third of each class had read one or more of the books, and thus were conversant – if unconsciously so – with the language of alchemy and magic. The underlying thesis for Daniel’s world history course was that the early 15^th century saw the end of the magical world view, above ground. He followed the Leonardo lectures with a case study of the trial of Joan of Arc, assigning the trial transcript for his students to read, so that they could find out for themselves that the question at stake was not whether Joan had heard voices and seen spiritual beings, but the nature of those voices and visions as either divine or demonic. When the syllabus arrived at the 20^th century, and they interrogated the nature of National Socialism, Bolshevism, Soviet Communism, or American capitalism, they could still entertain the question of whether the magical consciousness within the human being was active at that time, simply having gone below ground, and if so, what its effects might be. Daniel often remarked to his students at some point during the term that he believed that they had all incarnated with the intention of attending Hogwarts, but that his own Muggle generation had failed to build it!

Somewhere along the way, later in the semester, Dr. D would let his students in on a secret if they had not already caught on to it – that he always aimed to do three things with each and every lecture. First, he set out to tell a story. Second, that story would always pose a mystery with consequences for the period in which the story unfolded. But the third goal – the fun part for him, and for them if they set their minds to it – was that the story pointed way beyond itself, to some future twist or turn perhaps decades, centuries, even millennia away from the original event. History was full of rhythms, and you had to listen with your whole being if you were going to catch the beat and dance with it.

He regretted that during those years of teaching the world history survey, he hadn’t ever played with Harry Potter’s and Voldemort’s dance of Death and Resurrection as a way to understand a pronounced rhythm running down the middle of the last five centuries and beyond. That regret vanished instantly though when he thought of how useful this was to him now.

Two years earlier, he had been working in the Special Collections department at Columbia University’s Butler Library, doing research for a book about demonic possession. When he went to put his coat and briefcase in the security locker, he had found a book left behind by a previous scholar – Rosa Mira: Die Weltrose (The Rose of the World) by Daniel Andreev. Published in Germany in 2009, it was a translation from a Russian work that had been originally written in the 1950s. The book in the locker was the third of three volumes, and when he pulled it down and opened it, two words immediately caught his eye – “Besitz,” and “Stalin.” Besitz was the German word for “possession,” and though Daniel had planned a chapter to discuss the role of possession in the deeds of Adolf Hitler, he had not planned to look at Josef Stalin at all.

His German was minimal, and it was a struggle to make sense of the few sentences that had aroused his curiosity. He wrote out a very bad translation: “One of the emperors of Rome was chosen as the monad who might have all the gifts necessary for the successful implementation of the historic role of the Antichrist. The genius of Stalin and his ability to hypnotically possess the human will belonged to the visible remains of all those achievements, which marked the previous stage of work on this Gashsharva being, interrupted by the Light.”

Despite his garbled translation, and the occasional untranslatable Russian word, clearly the author was saying that Joseph Stalin could hypnotically possess others, which from Daniel’s experience, meant that Stalin himself had been possessed by dark spiritual beings. Thomas Lake Harris – the 19^th century American guru whom Daniel had come to Butler Library to study – had hypnotically controlled dozens of individuals for over a decade, including the brilliant English author, adventurer, and politician Laurence Oliphant. Daniel was convinced that Harris had used black magic to kill Oliphant, and he intended to argue in his book that it was impossible to understand the phenomenon of National Socialism without considering the role of possession.

Concepts like demonic possession were anathema in the university, even though most of the students were steeped in stories of possession through Anne Rice novels, the Twilight series, and many other vampire and exorcism stories. The battle between Good and Evil saturated this generation’s pop culture, and yet was strangely absent from the typical university history curriculum.

Since coming to New York City, Daniel was amazed how you could see that battle displayed on young peoples’ skin. Riding Rosie up to Williamsburg via the bike path that followed the perimeter of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, most of the cyclists coming the opposite direction were 20-somethings on their way to work in downtown Brooklyn or Manhattan. Almost every single one sported a tattoo, but these were not the old school tattoos – anchors, hearts, ships, ribbon-bearing swallows, mermaids, pin-up girls, sharks – of the American sailor or biker. Body art had morphed into billboards advertising the desire for myth. Dragons seemed the most ubiquitous design on both men and women, followed by angels, demons, griffons, phoenixes, tigers, lions, bulls, and other powerful animals. There were zodiac signs, scenes from Greek mythology, comic book superheroes, Buddhas, Kalis, Thor and Loki.

Sure enough, when he wheeled Rosie into “Spokes & Strings,” the tall, lithe blonde girl at the counter had a magnificent multi-colored dragon arching across her shoulders and arms. The scales were almost iridescent, finely etched down to the last tiny caudal scales that tapered to a point midway along her right forearm.

“It’s Fafnir, from the Völsunga Saga. Ever read Tolkien’s Sigurd and Gudrun?”

The young woman reached into the glass case, drew forth a cardboard box with her left hand, quickly closed the door to the case with her right, and had turned and stepped away before Daniel had a chance to respond. He followed her over to the repair stand, where a half-assembled custom bike was taking shape. Daniel felt disoriented, since he had barely glanced at the tattoo, and because this gossamer beauty whom he had taken to be a salesperson seemed to vanish for an instant before she re-materialized a few feet away, with ratchet and derailleur in hand. Strange music was coming from an iPod on the wooden workbench in the shop. Daniel thought that he heard an accordion barely audible above an overlapping suite of strange beats. The accordion stopped, and he heard an ethereal voice sing: “If trav-el is search-ing, and home what’s been found. I’m not. . .”

“Do you hear those cellos riffing on that two-bar motif, a fifth apart? I love how she is always playing with the fifth. She says that this song came from her grandma telling her that there were only two different types of birds – the ones that kept the same partner all their lives, and the ones who were always out hunting for new partners.”

“There’s also something known as ‘serial monogamy,’” Daniel answered. “When I was taking ornithology in college, the scientific orthodoxy held that 92% of bird species were monogamous. Then some birders really started looking at nesting pairs, and they found that about 30% of these ‘monogamous’ males were slipping off for dalliances with other females.”

“Right.” Her left hand reached for the pedal and began cranking it, while her right deftly twirled a screwdriver at the top of the thumbscrew on the derailleur. The rhythm of the chain shifting from one sprocket to the next sounded comforting to Daniel against the weird ripples of percussion coming from the boom box. Then he heard the accordion come in again, and that voice: “I’m going hunting. I’m the hunter. I’ll bring back the goods. . .”

She moved from task to task, not looking up as she spoke. “Remember that scene in Heartburn, when Meryl Streep complains to her father about her husband’s cheating, and he says: ‘You want monogamy? Marry a swan!’”

He hadn’t seen the movie, an even stranger song was playing now, and he had walked in totally anxious about bringing his $60 Craigslist 10-speed into a shop known across the city for its coveted hand-built frames and rarified assemblies.

“I wonder if you’ve got time to look at my rear wheel. I hit a wicked pothole coming across 54^th Street last night, and it seems way out of true. Or the rim might be bent. . .”

She had already taken Rosie by the handlebars and was wheeling her in to the shop area.

“I see three broken spokes back here. You lucked out – seems like the rim is fine.”

As she lifted her arms to raise Rosie up to another stand, the dragon seemed to stretch out to its full length.

“There!” she exclaimed, beaming. “You hear that Bolero ostinato?!”

Daniel noticed small movements within her larger ones, synced perfectly to the sluggish, sliding notes of the vocal. She played her fingers across the spokes, plucking the wheel like it was a harp.

“On old rims like this, all the spokes are pretty brittle, and ready to snap anytime.”

She had removed the rear wheel, deflated the tube, and was already slipping tire irons between the tire and rim.

“These tires are about as bald as Björk in that Hunter video. I could replace these with a pair of Ultra GatorSkins with Kevlar bead for a hundred bucks. The spokes are a buck apiece, $15 for the repair. Scratch that. You need a new tube too. See?”

She brought the tube over and showed him the rot around the valve stem. Daniel nodded, sneaking another look at the tail of the dragon rather than the tube. Just beyond it, tattooed on the inside of her forearm just above her left wrist, was a small golden ring. As she stepped back into the shop, his eyes fixed on the spot where the dragon’s back snaked across the top of her shoulders. He had been dimly aware of the sound of strings again, then odd half-electronic, half-organic sounding pulses. Now the singer’s voice sounded out again, declarative, strong, but retreating somehow: “All these accidents that ha-ap-pen. Foll-ow the dots. Co-o-in-cid-ence makes seh-eh-ehnse only with you-OO-oo. You don’t have to speak. . .”

“Ahh, I only paid $60 for the bike. I think I’ll stick with the new spokes and tube.”

“Sixty bucks! You did well. These Shimano derailleurs are real workhorses. They never seize up or need adjustment. Brakes are fine too, though you could use new pads. When’s the last time you greased this chain?” She shot him a playful scolding look.

“I’m ashamed to say I haven’t touched it – or anything – since I got it this spring. I wanted a bike I wouldn’t have to worry would be stolen. That’s why I like the pink frame and tape. I figured it would discourage thieves.”

“The color doesn’t matter. They repaint most of them. Nice chrome molybdenum frame. When Ross started out in the 40s they were over near the Navy Yards, mainly doing galvanizing on ship hulls. After the war they started making wheel chairs and roller skates along with bikes.”

She brushed the grime from the top tube where the model name was obscured.

“Centaur. Nice name. Do you call him that?”

Daniel blushed. “Her name is ‘Rosie.’ And I’m Daniel.”

“I’m Mimir. ‘Mim’ for short.”

“Sounds French.”

“Icelandic. I grew up in Akranes, across the fjord from Reykjavik. A little fishing village. My dad’s a fisherman. It’s main claim to fame, outside the Langislandur beach, is that Jon Oskar, one of the Atom Poets, lived there. He was a real modern Icelandic bard – a musician and poet. Like Björk.”

“Björk? Is that the singer you were listening to?”

Mimir laughed. “You mean you’ve never heard of her?” Her accent sounded distinctly Irish when she was animated.

“I’d heard the name. I always thought it was a man.”

“Well, she’s as much man as woman, child as adult, animal as human, Starseed as Earthling.” Mimir finished trueing the wheel, took Rosie down from the stand, and passed her to Daniel. Feeling right away that the ‘blip’ was gone from the rear wheel, it was as if his own rhythm had been restored.

“She’s got her tune back now, for sure. Thanks so much Mimir.”

As he paid the bill, and was on his way out the door, Mimir called after him. “Here, take this with you,” she said as she handed him the Björk Homogenic CD. “I have the feeling you could use it for that book you’re trying to start. Björk’s all about rhythm – rhythm in both Nature and Culture. She’s deeply connected to the Earth. And to the stars. Give it some time. I’m sure you’re going to like it. There’s not much accordion, but what there is is haunting.”

Mimir turned and headed back into her workshop, as the bell over the door rang to announce another customer, who held the door for the dumbstruck Daniel as he wheeled Rosie out onto the sidewalk.

Chapter Three: Clairvoyances

Though he had experienced having his thoughts read on occasions before, Daniel was still unnerved when Mimir spoke about what was in his mind. He remembered the first time it ever happened to him. He had been about her age, working as a waiter in a busy steak house. On that particular evening, he’d come in for a “short shift” – arriving at 6 PM for the dinner slam. The hostess had just filled up his section, when a customer who was sitting alone at a table in another section motioned to him.

“I don’t mean to intrude,” the man began, “but I know that you have been thinking about starting a business venture – something to do with genealogy, and landscape – and you are a bit anxious about it, even though you know it is a great idea. I just wanted to tell you that when I was about your age, I once had a dream, but I didn’t follow it, and I’ve always regretted it. I hope you’ll do whatever you can to pursue this idea of yours.”

Then the man turned back to his dinner, and Daniel was left as dumbfounded as he had been at the bike shop. His first instinct was to get out of the room, for he felt naked all of a sudden. He had gone round a corner and reached his hands up to his head, as if the top of his skull had been lifted off.

The man was absolutely right. When Daniel arrived for his shift, he was totally consumed with thoughts for a new research and writing initiative that he was thinking of calling “Paleohistories.” The name had come to him in a flash as he was running around fetching orders for his first few tables of the night.

Mimir and this stranger in the restaurant shared one of the most common characteristics of the clairvoyant – they sensed other peoples’ thoughts and feelings when those thoughts and feelings were particularly intense, or when they had a strong personal connection to the inner impulses another person was experiencing. The stranger connected to Daniel’s thoughts through a long vanished biographical wave that had crested at one time in his own life; Mimir seemed to have connected through the music. Björk’s songs were totally familiar to Mimir, but they were wholly strange to Daniel. Somehow, through her love of that music, she discovered both Daniel’s primary relationship to music – through playing the accordion – and his current conundrum – the Where’s Voldemort? book that lay fallow and unattended. Like the stranger those many years ago, Mimir – a stranger too – was giving him the gift of encouragement for a task that frightened him.

It was almost as if Daniel’s thoughts and feelings were waveforms, and Mimir had tuned to just the right wavelength in order to receive them. He was relieved she hadn’t picked up the wavelengths of desire and fascination for her that he had felt from the moment she had spoken to him. Still, desire and fascination were themselves powerful magical agents of communication – in the physical world, but even more powerfully, across the threshold to the spiritual world. The bestselling book The Secret was just the latest in a long line of 20^th century materialistic renderings of an ancient occult law that human thoughts and feelings in themselves have a power. Daniel had always had a sense of himself as lucky, as “gifted” by the world, but he had lived with these gifts long enough to know that it was a reciprocal relationship. Attentiveness, good cheer, warm interest, gratitude – these were all gifts that the human could give in return to the unseen beings that surround him.

Daniel wasn’t sure, but he suspected that the book that had been left behind in his locker at Columbia was just such a gift exchange. His research on possession was dark work, as dark as any historical inquiry he had ever made, but its ultimate aim was to give people a tool to recognize something that Daniel felt in his bones was coming – or was already here. In situation after situation, Daniel had witnessed on an almost daily basis, episodes where he was sure that the person standing before him was not “all there,” and that something else was acting through that person. Having studied many cases of mass possession from history, he had developed an acute sensitivity to it. He wasn’t clairvoyant, but he knew it when he saw it. Or smelled it, for it was more like a dark, nighttime sensibility, like the sense of smell.

Scholarship, particularly historical study, often led to a sort of clairvoyance, an uncanny second sight for the object of study, so that insights and discoveries seemed to surface from below as much as be won from above. There was no reason it shouldn’t; scholarly study focused the mind, and drew forth strong emotions as well. Daniel was sure that when he was doing his work with the clearest heart and most devoted attention, the insights he won were not so much won as given. They “arrived” from somewhere else, or from someone else. It had absolutely been true of the pair of discoveries that he had recently made, ones that he believed could revolutionize the understanding of all of human history.

Over the years, Daniel had amassed a considerable database of birth and death information for significant personalities from the last 5 or 600 years of Western European history. Studying the birth and death horoscopes had led him to discover that there was a relationship between the two. The first pattern that he noticed was that in the heliocentric horoscopes, the angle between the Sun and Saturn was often the same or its complement at both death in the preceding incarnation, and birth in the next. It was as if there was some sort of law of conservation of motion at work, where the stars were markers of that economy of motion. The second pattern Daniel noted was that there were almost always significant reoccurring alignments in the two horoscopes, particularly the heliocentric alignment of Mercury and/or Venus from death in one incarnation to birth in the next incarnation.

Daniel felt that Rosa Mira had been left for him, because as far as he knew, he was the only scholar whom he was aware of who had expertise in the history of demonic possession and a working knowledge of reincarnation, which was central to Andreev’s revelation. It would be easy for any materialist Western historian to dismiss out of hand Andreev’s descriptions, especially his identification of Joseph Stalin as the precursor of the Antichrist, since Andreev had been imprisoned and tortured by Stalin’s regime. Daniel believed that, in the two astrological patterns that he had discovered, he had the evidence needed to show that Andreev was telling the truth. Without Andreev’s hints about the other two incarnations of “Voldemort,” Daniel could never have identified them; he could merely verify them based on these patterns.

The first appearance of this villain was as the Roman Emperor Caracella at the end of the second century. Born in Lugdunum (present day Lyon, France) in the year AD 188 to Imperial Governor Lucius Septimus Severus and Julia Domna, he and his younger brother Geta accompanied their father on his expedition against Britain in AD 207, after Severus had become Emperor. As his father was concluding a peace treaty with the Britons, Caracella attempted to murder him. After upbraiding his son for this deed, Severus offered his son a drawn sword, saying: “If you are so ambitious of reigning alone, now imbrue your hands within the blood of your father, and let not the eyes of the world be witness to your want of filial tenderness.” Severus died soon after, leaving his ambitious elder son to continue pursuing his path to power. Severus had directed his sons to serve as co-emperors, but Caracella immediately sought to displace his brother. Persuading his mother to arrange a meeting between them, Caracella had his brother stabbed to death, and he died in his mother’s arms. After Rome’s most celebrated jurist Papinian refused Caracella’s order to defend his murder of his brother before the Senate, Caracella had Papinian put to death.

Caracella is remembered as the Emperor who first declared the people of the Roman Empire “citizens,” and spoke of the “brotherhood of man.” This sort of virtuous public proclamation set against private deeds of the most barbaric treachery would continue to mark “Voldemort’s” career. In his next incarnation, as the Archbishop of Seville and Grand Inquisitor Don Fernando Valdés, he demonstrated the most unsavory personality traits of all power-seeking tyrants, while showing a peculiar cruelty for his closest associates and rivals.

By 1561, the Inquisitorial laws had become largely routinized, and Valdés resolved to remedy this by publishing a new 81-article code instructing officials of the Inquisition on the minutiae of carrying out arrests, trials, and executions, along with the maintenance of secret prisons. These 81 articles became the basis for the entire Inquisitorial apparatus right into the early 19^th century. In the driest, dispassionate phrasing of legalistic language, Valdés described a system of total intellectual and spiritual surveillance, supported by a grand bureaucracy for intimidation and arrest. Valdés instructed jailers to prohibit any communication between prisoners, even dictating the questions that the jailers might ask them. Article 15, demanding a detailed biography of accused heretics, gives some sense of the spectacular total invasion of human personhood that was instituted by Valdés:

“. . .the accused shall be required to give an abridged history of his life, mentioning those towns where he has made a considerable stay, the motives of his sojourn, the persons he associated with, the friends he acquired, his studies, the masters he studied under, the period when he began them, and the time that he continued them; if he had been out of Spain, at what time and with whom he had quitted the country, and how long he had been absent. He shall be asked if he is instructed in the truths of the Christian religion, and shall be required to repeat the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo. He shall be asked if he has confessed himself, and to what confessors. When he has given an account of all these things, he shall be asked if he knows or suspects the cause of his arrest, and his reply shall regulate the questions put to him afterwards.”

Valdés even specified the color and insignia of the habit that would be given to the prisoners after they were stripped of their clothing. His prescriptions for logistics intensified with the “celebration” of the auto-da-fé, the elaborate public ritual that culminated with the confessions and execution through burning at the stake. Intent to let no one slip through his murderous net, Valdés in Article 44 specified that should the accused convert on the scaffold, before hearing his sentence, all inquisitors were to consider whether the confession was motivated solely by the fear of death, and thus to go forward with the execution. Throughout this document, Valdés spoke of torture as if it were a completely everyday affair.

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