Ch. 12: Via

Wyland awoke after a restless sleep to find he was still thirty thousand feet in the air, suspended by speed, wind, and a massive torrent of heat from the fuel burning in the turbine engines outside the little tube of a cabin. Out the little porthole window, clouds and ocean appeared suspended in the dawn light, un-moving yet whisking past at six hundred miles per hour. 

He was disheveled, what hair was left on his head was going every which way, and his traveling suit, a loose two piece that never fit quite right, now bunched at odd angles, forcing him to readjust himself in his seat as he sat up. 

His mind went immediately to young Jonathan. The poor boy had been unable to accurately describe the experience of hearing the curse. He had babbled about a sound, a word, a feeling, all of those, all at once. A grating, head-ache inducing, crunching noise. The sound of a meat grinder, but words, also, in a foreign language.

Almost none of the words Jonathan remembered hearing were real curse words. It was all gibberish, save one. Roland had immediately checked the recorder, and only on one word had it faded and warbled and cracked. He knew the name. He wrote down everything Jonathan said, was able to write it out on paper with no problems. 

It was a word he knew from an old book on hermetic philosophy. A tense tome of old hybrid Hebrew/Christian demonology and mysticism, full of line drawings and recipes and obscure poems, astrology and morality and obtuse references. The book was written in the 2nd century, translated from the original Hebrew by a Rabbi in the 1970's, and was now a standard text for mystics and conspiracy theorists. It contained many references to an order of "keepers", with an insignia not unlike the sign for the Freemasons, that held deep insights from before the time of Solomon. 

It had described the angel of death in that book. He/She/It had the body of a raven, cloven hooves, and a skeletal face. It hungered for life "like a predator hungers for flesh." It was a keeper of damned souls, like the devil, but also took life directly, like the angel of death. The book implied that it was this demon who took Jesus from the cross, and ushered The Lord to hell before His resurrection. Its name, pronounced directly as it was in the original Hebrew, was Alva. The Rabbi had entered a footnote regarding the name: "For although it is with consternation that I even write the true name of this daemon, or any daemon for that matter, it occurs to me that the Roman/Latin/Germanic root of 'evil' is a close bastardization of this terrible daemon's name, and is thus useful for more than simple linguistic purposes, and the use of the bastardization by society in general may be indicative of a deeper truth of the general fear of death and of God's wrath."

The book instructed a learned soul to protect against the name, never to speak it aloud, and it showed a rune to protect a magi against the angel. 

Jonathan had spoken the name aloud, but it didn't sound like the noise he described. It was just a word then, not the curse. What was missing that made it a curse? Was Jonathan now destined to die?

As dark thoughts ran through Wylands head, this old book now rested, half open, in Wyland's lap. The page it was open to described the hermetic science and the mysterious "star of Solomon", how to study the stars and planets for prophesy, and of the wheel of the gods. The gods, as near as Wyland could tell, were thoughts as much as beings, feelings made real, demons and angels in the minds of mankind, and each had a counter god or demon that kept the wheel in balance. Against Alva on the wheel was the god of birth, Via. There were gods of war and of peace, anger and consolation, love and hate, poverty and wealth, failure and success, and so on, and in the center of the wheel, the creator god. This creator god was un-named, though the book implied that a learned man should already know the name, and could speak it under the right circumstances to return all things to balance. 

But Wyland was not a student of religion, he was a student of law. He had been asked only once, sincerely, what his opinion on God was, and he responded truthfully: 
"Fuck if I know."

It always made him smile ironically that he had placed his hand on a bible and been sworn in so many times. Why would a man who thinks this book is gibberish, written by inbred goat herders from two thousand years off, worry about lying under it's oath? Why would a murderer worry about a book that condones the murder of "God's enemies?" Rape and slavery and murder could be justified using the text of the bible. That our legal system essentially rested on the hope that a criminal might be cowed into telling the truth because of an old, contradictory, violent and fucked up religious book was laughable, were it not such a serious lapse of reason.

Religion. It was all foolishness, or so he thought, until recently. Now he was beginning to wonder if maybe someone, somewhere, had actually gotten it right? The bible, of course, offered no hints, other than a set of psalms that sounded an awful lot like a true curse, but heard from a bystander's viewpoint. Curses and daemons and the god of death. Wyland shivered involuntarily.

But this dark and evil thought brought a new thought, a brighter thought, that crested on Wyland like a dreamscape; Wondrous and new and clean. What about blessings? If curses could be spoken aloud, then blessings should be, too. He thought a moment... he now knew a name, a counter curse, the opposing, balancing god's name. He spoke it aloud: "Via."

He said it again, with more force: "Via!"

A chubby woman sitting next to him with deep, sweet brown eyes, a massive bosom and a pastel flowery dress stared at him with a puzzled smile on her face.

He looked at her and asked "sorry, what word did you just hear?"

"Pardon?" She laughed a girlish, nervous laugh behind this question.

"What word did you just hear me speak? I'm just curious."

"You said something like via, like the Roman word, yes?"

"What Roman word?" He said, innocently.

"Oh, you know, via, like a road. Like Via Appia, the main road in ancient Rome."

"Oh, ok. Sorry to disturb you." She closed her eyes and pretended to drift off to sleep, assuming she had never woken up and this was just another weird dream.

Wyland dejectedly shifted his weight in the maddeningly small cloth chair and stared out the little window. Dammit, what's missing?

Land was visible below them now, a flat, green country. He could feel the lumbering jetliner start to descend, flying now through thicker, more turbulent air. He watched the wings bend and sway in the invisible and churning wind, and could hear the faint rattle and boom of the air-frame as it solidly took this invisible thrashing. 

Off in the distance, to the far north, Wyland could see an odd cloud formation, like a jet contrail, but sloped downward, slicing from high above, going through the clouds all the way down to the ground. He thought maybe he saw a small orange glow on the ground where cloud met ground, but he couldn't be sure. Soon enough, the strange cloud was out of his sight, and his mind turned to the task at hand.

An hour later, Wyland stepped out of the terminal to the waiting queues of buses and taxis. They all had a boxy, regal look to them, strangely foreign, and an odd sensation of place fell upon him. Just by the cars around him, he could tell he wasn't in the states, and everything looked so damn... English. Pictures of the royal guard in their fuzzy hats welcomed him to the British Isles. He hailed a cab driving past, but failed, and then stepped to a waiting cab. A dingy man with bloodshot eyes looked him over and waved him into the cab. He didn't attempt to help Wyland with his luggage, just sat there silent. Wyland slumped into the seat. 

"Westminster, please." And they were off.