The Romulus Chronicles: Mary's Tale

1

I Am Weary

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

~ William Shakespeare

Death is a delightful hiding place for weary men.

~ Herodotus

At first glance he did not seem especially impressive. He worked hard to keep up that appearance. He tried to look like an everyday dull and uninteresting businessman, banker or professional man; no one to be concerned about.

Nothing to see here.

He stood just under than six feet tall and as a physical type he favored the British actor, Jason Statham. However, he could not conceal his stealthy prime predator gait.

He was said to be handsome. He had olive skin and a shaven head. Unlike many men he seldom showed stubble on his face and head. His eyes were dark brown, and he had a Roman nose. His expressive eyes seemed to reflect ancient wisdom and the pain that he had seen too much.

His hands were scarred as was much of his body. His dress was always neat, non-wrinkled shirts and sharply pressed pleats. He had a penchant for Jerry Garcia ties and cowboy boots.

He tried to seem prim, even effete. However, his rugged presence often somehow seemed regal.

He considered himself a soldier on a mission.

Tonight, he was pensive and introspective. His mind wandered as thoughts from his past broke the surface and then dived deeper. One disconnected thought gave rise to another in a stream of consciousness.

He had searched constantly before, and today was the same as every day. There was no sanctuary in death for him. His was an eternity of watching humanity until the end of time. He could only remember the names he took during his more memorable incarnations. He lived his life like he was a character in a play. He had to be consistent with his role.

He had homes and secret refuges all over the earth.

Unfortunately, his gift of eternal life came with dire curses. During the full moon, he transformed into a ravenous beast, retaining full consciousness of who he is and memory of every savage thing it did. The beast was his ultimate weapon against evil.

However, it cursed him with an insatiable hunger for the most forbidden of foods…human flesh. From the beginning, he only took contemptible criminals who eluded human authority. He tasted only upon the flesh of the most iniquitous; and he pillaged their ill-gotten fortunes.

He found his early years contemptible, full of arbitrary slaughter and lessons learned hard and fast. He had crawled out of too many shallow graves to remember. Reality was an unforgiving teacher. Anger and despair turned to loneliness. He had watched too many friends and lovers wither and disappear before his ageless eyes. Isolation was crushing until he remembered he had the power of creation as well as destruction.

He had been reluctant to burden another with his fate but, his forlornness had become crushing. He thought that, out of mercy he had impulsively made his first companion. With all her imperfections, she became a partner and lover. Someone to breach time with, until she wearied of the mission and became disillusioned with mankind. After four hundred years, she turned her heart off and her mind wandered far away.

Only after she was gone, he understood that he had turned her to sooth his loneliness.

Each of the others he created and lost became like time stacking the unrelenting weight of stones on his chest.

During those days, he hated himself. He had come to think of himself as only the monster. The three-day spree of death and destruction was laced with the thrill of killing, hunting and vengeance. He was at once sickened and plagued by his actions but compelled in a relentless spiral.

But deep inside, he knew he liked the power of the arcane wolf.

He was lucky in his confusion and rage to have found rare refuge with Daedalus, an immortal of similar fate. Daedalus was of even more ancient origins, a scholar, engineer and scientist, and yes, a wizard. This immortal became his mentor.

Daedalus nurtured the man in him and gave him a model for one who survives at all costs and still finds ways to serve humanity. Daedalus showed him that he was more than just the beast. Daedalus touched his soul and set him on a course of higher learning and humanism.

Under this wise tutelage he became an apprentice. His early lessons had to do with the soul, how the soul needs to understand itself and exorcise its own demons. As he became nothing, he could do anything.

He had lived for more years than he cared to count, changed names and locations always searching.

In most lifetimes he made his living as a merchant. But at the times he was a mercenary, pirate and a raider. There were many wars. They provided plunder. As a result, he created secret caches of wealth.

Wealth became a weapon; riches gave him freedom.

Each time The Cabal as he called them was behind him, lying in wait to eliminate him. They are the minions of corruption personified. Their aim was absolute, and their intentions are evil; to do the will of a primordial demon of death and decay. Over the millennia they hid in secret, illegitimate cadres in powerful societies such as the Mysteries, the Ancient Order of the Hierophants or the Rose Croix, Freemasons or Opus Dei.

Ages ago, they had hideously murdered his wife.

He missed her with a longing that he could not reconcile with sense or reason. She was gone because of his failure. He would have to find her, lose her, wait and find her; over and over.

He had grown weary and restless with the world, feeling as if his very soul would break

The same curse that afflicted him caused her to reincarnate in every generation and for him to be compelled to find her. He had lived for more years than he cared to count, changed names and locations always searching. She became one of two of his primary missions.

The fiends had unsuccessfully tried to ensnare him for years.

Powerful magic kept the Cabal from uncovering him, so they tracked and watched for her instead. Unless he attacked them, they could not detect him. Elusive as a wraith, he baffled their leader and his many tendrils. His wolf was created to terminate this demon and to negate its plans. So, he stalked them as well.

From ancient days their strategy was to cause dissent by pitting people against each other. Whenever one nation persecuted and enslaved another, he knew the Cabal was behind it. Their merciless, infernal leader delighted in setting men against women and fostering brutality.

Where the worst abuses were, he could find their nefarious lord. He had many scores to settle with that infernal shade.

Moving his eyes over the books and papers in his vast library, he remembered having saved the scrolls. Some were spoils of wars long forgotten. Some saved in the flood that destroyed the Library in Alexandria.

His eyes lingered on his personal copy of ‘Cotton Vitellius’. This famous manuscript contains an epic poem based on his adventures in the Eighth Century. He had been a sacred warrior by the Norsemen. He had taken a Viking woman as his companion and owned land in Geatland.

Eyeing this manuscript, he is taken back some 1200 years, to the wild hills of what is now England. The horror and alienation had caused his Geat companion’s mind to abandon her. A cold winter hard on cattle and women had kept him in the Nordic great hall for many months. Until he saw the shimmering curtain of dancing lights and heard the calling of ethereal music summoning him to the shores of East Anglia.

This pulling left him with strange feelings of despair and the heights of passionate love. He could feel a drawing from the rocky shores of Lochlanach. He followed the call and abandoned all to find her.

He had searched, but found only her body wrapped in white linen, wildflowers in her hair. She had died in childbirth along with the tiny infant at her side. His grieving wail was heard almost throughout the British Isles.

Each time he came closer and closer to finding her, but he always came up short.

He retreated from the world after that. He turned to the mystic arts. In subterranean chambers, he learned to separate body and soul and set out on journeys for extended periods. He slowly learned some of the arts of controlling elements, space and time. With his newfound skills, he wandered around Europe, finally settling with a community of Spanish Jewish mystics.

At that time, he took the name Melchizedek and joined an early community of mystics. They knew he was not a Jew but welcomed his intellect. His association with them lasted almost 120 years. He plumbed the depths and breadth of these teachings, finding secret codes within early Hebrew texts, leaving his impressions on the movement from the beginning.

The community whispered that, with each full moon, he summoned the golem.

He delved into the play of the light and the dark. He mystically wandered paths of light and saw how it all balances. Even evil was a part of the plan and was an exercise in free will. He investigated the dark to find the divine sparks within.

His greatest lessons were that he received only to share with others and that mercy and justice had to temper each other.

The wolf had to take, but only to serve the greater good. He was fighting a just war. Sometimes acts of loving kindness and charity had to take the savage form of annihilating those who exploit the powerless. George could only become a saint by slaying the rapacious dragon. The defender meting out justice to oppressors above human laws was equal to any saint.

After the age of Enlightenment, he adapted to modernity by becoming a scientist and engineer. Science and medicine gave him hope that perhaps humanity could change from bewildered children to rational adults. He had been a physician in many of his identities and found freeing the sick from the slavery of illness nourished his soul and made amends.

Over the centuries, he worked behind the scenes advancing causes of human freedom and dignity. He was active in many of the events that changed history for the advancement of humanity.

He was at the signing of the Magna Carta; a witness to the signing of Brother Aymeric, Master Knight Templar. He attended the signing of the Declaration of Independence and paid the massive bar tab after the deliberations. In France he financed the Revolution, arming the just citizens and organizing groups setting up community kitchens and work programs.

He pleaded for mercy for Louis and Antoinette. But the mob had made its murderous decision,

He had been part of the Underground Railroad; ushering escaped slaves to the north and financing many of their home-based businesses. He had advocated against the genocide of the indigenous people. When the Nazis moved their vile hands across most of Europe; he secreted thousands of Jews, Gypsies and Armenians out of Nazi dominated countries.

He was in Selma, Alabama facing the dogs, hoses and nightsticks.

In his current sojourn, he became a Doctor of Clinical and Neurological Psychology. He needed more freedom and being a modern physician was too all consuming.

He knew that many of the people the Cabal persecuted they labeled mentally ill and locked away in hospitals that became their prisons and torture chambers. They were always under treatment by corrupt men, who only served the Cabal, in private sections of reputable institutions.

He had seen over the past hundreds of years that the mentally ill were the least understood of the afflicted. They were misjudged, feared, and isolated in asylums; treated worse than cattle.

In ancient times, it was easy to call them witches or say that they were possessed. Later they had been the subjects of scorn and entertainment or hidden away from wealthy families who knew nothing about mental illness. In the early twentieth century, in many of the large state-run hospitals of they were treated like servants by the staff.

Their situation had gotten better over the past sixty years, but most societies still shun the psychiatrically impaired. They are stripped of their independence and ability to make decisions governing their own lives.

He had to act alone. His situation was so incredible that to reveal what he is and the corruption he fought was likely to label him as psychotic. He could only trust his instincts and flashes of insight to lead him to the Cabal’s victims.

But enough introspection and gloom. He had a mission to fulfill.

He scoured the news media for suspicious items. He knew that when he found where groups of subjugated women were mysteriously disappearing, he would find the demon; and where he was, she might also be.

News articles and professional journals alerted him to the surprising resurgence of prefrontal lobotomies among schizophrenic patients at Creedmoor Hospital in the rural Mt. Summit. This is an old and extreme procedure rarely used today because it destroys brain tissue. Significantly, no male patients were treated.

The results seemed impressive, but many questions remained. There were concerns about data collection and the criteria for surgical selection. The professional journals indicated the need for psychological evaluations to determine the efficacy of expanding treatment. His instincts and the auguries screamed that evil was behind this.

Soon, he had secured a professorship in the Psychology Department of nearby State University as a clinical researcher. The position came with an appointment to the professional staff at Creedmoor Hospital tasking him with pre- and post-evaluations of surgery candidates.

However, this put him in indirect opposition to the physician in charge.

He soon found that this surgeon was blocking the flow of information and statistics thorough piles of paperwork. He was taking advantage of the bureaucratic system to conceal his actions.

He hid that many of the candidates died pre-treatment. These deaths were falsely documented. The psychologist came upon convenient and ludicrous explanations. But these were medical procedures, and he was not a licensed physician, so his opinions were excluded from consideration.

Bringing these crimes to the attention of the authorities would contradict his prime goal.

Therefore, he began his own investigation. The skills he had acquired over the millennia allowed him to easily gain access into secret areas of patients designated for surgery. He found that the women were always vulnerable wives of rich men who all belonged to a particular extreme religious congregation.

There were terrible signs of physical abuse on their bodies. He found the terrified eyes of women who had been brutalized. Most would not speak to him, but he could feel and smell the fear emanating from them. There was an unusually high rate of pre-surgery suicides. Their bodies were promptly cremated and could not be examined. No autopsies meant there was no physical evidence.

But then, he heard the empyreal music and saw the mystical curtain of dancing lights.

The psychologist was the outsider. He found his hands tied.

However, when the time was ripe, the wolf could not be denied.

2

Asylum

Yeah, a storm is threatening

My very life today

If I don’t get some shelter

Lord, I’m gonna fade away Rolling Stones–Gimme Shelter 1971

It may have only been a dream, the sensation of someone desperately searching for me as I slept. I could hear the echo of a whisper calling my name. Glimpses of a beautiful man flitted through my dreams. It seemed he was gently shaking me.

I woke with a start feeling as if someone was in the room. I leaned over and switched on the light and pulled the white down comforter up around my breasts.

I scanned the room, everything was in its place, the window was open and the crème-colored sheers that framed the windows fluttered with the warm breeze. I could hear the chorus of tree frogs outside in the grass and ponds.

I switched the light back off and turned over. I tossed and turned thinking about what was to happen tomorrow. Insisting that I was not right in the head, tomorrow he was sending me to hospital. Demanding that I must sleep the xanax he had given me made me drop off.

Morning came faster than I thought it would. The breaking of night into day was not soft or pleasant it came with a ringing in my head and eyes that felt dry. He knocked hard three times on the door, I could sense how his knuckles must have felt hitting the painted wood so hard.

I sat up and said a sleepy Yeah.

My bag had already been packed; all I needed to do was change clothes and head downstairs. There would be three men that would take me; two orderlies and a physician, all of whom were my acquaintances from our church.

My husband would be already gone, so there would be no goodbyes. I dressed–a prim white dress and a light sweater over my shoulders, white shoes and then pinned my hair up and grabbed my case.

The men were waiting for me; one of the orderlies took my case and put it in the side of the ambulance. I was approached by an immaculately dressed man I knew as Dr. Sterling who was a church elder.

He explained that for us to have a nice ride to the hospital I would be required to have an injection; something that would calm me down. I felt calm already I told them, he smiled and shook his head as the orderlies grabbed both my arms. The doctor administered the shot.

It took a few moments, but I wasn’t asleep as much as I was extraordinarily sedate. My eyes wanted to close, and my body went limp. The orderlies lifted me and placed me on a gurney, strapped me down, and placed me into the back of the ambulance. The doctor would ride in the front seat with the driver the two orderlies sat in the back with me.

Because I was so sedated, and my body felt heavy, thick and weak, I could only make out fragments of what the orderlies were saying to each other. They chuckled about the way my breasts would jiggle as the ambulance moved over the road.

This made me terribly worried and frightened. I looked at their hands as they sat alongside of me, broad work worn hands with thick calluses. Their uniforms were crisp white, shoes polished to a high sheen black.

I could feel someone’s hand on my stocking moving up my inner thigh. Their words were warbled in my mind; all I could do was let the warm gritty feel of hands move up my thighs, pausing along the top of my stockings where my flesh was not covered.

Both hands lingered there and moved closer towards my underwear. They had pulled my dress up, they lingered along the edge of my panties…I was frightened to my core. Even under the best of circumstances, there was nothing I could do.

I was so sedated all I could do was just lie there. I also knew that if I acted up, then the chances of me leaving the place I was being sent to would vanish forever.

I felt helpless. It was an old familiar feeling

As the car went over what must have familiar bumps on the causeway, the orderlies abruptly stopped what they were doing and put my dress back down.

The institution was far from the fenced-in shoreline, I could see from my view at the window the road glisten from new rain. The island is where I was now, behind bricks and mortar, a door without a key.

I could only see shades of grey. The building was long and big, I could not imagine all the rooms inside of it. There was another structure with two pyramid shaped roofs. In my mind that one burned sepia tones. It made me sick to think of what had happened in that building. I closed my eyes and waited.

The faces of the people were a blur, they moved too fast, talked too fast. They gave me medicine and poked me with needles at first; laid me on white starched linens, in sterile` white rooms, with checkerboard linoleum floors. Everything was frigid. I thought that they must have done this on purpose, kept in a thin cotton gown, no real blankets, kept the temperature down, an island that was a meat locker.

I could hear the shuffling of medicated feet pass the metal door, see the shadows cast by the staff as they hurried past the door. They were only shadows, light and dark, the bend of light and object. There were mesh screens that ran along the tops of the doors; sometimes they would close these if the person in the room became too loud. They would shut him in with his screaming, rambling diatribe, accusations, hatred, vengeance, and wrath.

Patients were wheeled around on gurneys, strapped down while looking at the passing ceiling. The buzz of the electric lamps; each one emitting its own noise, its own little tune. I would see the concrete dips of the ceiling, how they looked like garden rows. If the world were upside down, they could be filled with water.

I laid there thinking about all the different types of ceilings in this place. I wondered if the builder had done the same and looked up and decided to give us something to look at. I wondered at this small act of kindness that no one would see but the patients strapped to beds or gurneys.

The baths were large and made of stone set in some sort of box, blue drapes on metal rings hung from metal poles. The curtains were for show, there was no privacy. The only private place was in one’s mind. The baths were longer than a person could be in them comfortably. This was the only time I was warm. I could feel their eyes moving over me.

They used large canvas toppers for the tubs to secure patients. The same used as ships sails, with metal grommets sewn into place and canvas tie downs along the edge of the tub. They would place patients inside, and then unceremoniously move canvas up to the neck. They would wrap patients’ foreheads in gauze a few times to catch the sweat.

They circled like vultures, dark creatures in their scrubs. They did not speak directly to me or me to them. I considered the yellowish tiles on the walls, and how they connected to the floor. If I looked long and closely enough, I could see the slight difference in yellow on each of the tiles. One day I counted them, they had left me to lie in the tub.

When let outside, the sun be would blinding, moving from inside the stone womb onto the green soft lawn. The building was so very big. Now that I think about the large stones on the outside, and the pressure that they would exert on the minds of those inside. The stones were impossibly big, and the windows were black. Dark like the eyes on the wood and lacquered Jesus on my mother’s wall; eyes that seemed to follow you around the room.

I looked at all the sterile furniture, the cabinets, metal upon metal, the trays, the plates, the doors, the fixtures. The beds, metal upon metal, steel tubing holding onto electricity that ran along the walls and into the floors. The desks of the staff were heavy great metal battleships of bureaucracy.

The sea outside would swell, and eat away at the shoreline, the constant lapping of the waves; the sea encroaching on the land; the wind whipping across the sand. The wind would become angry and throw sloppy punches against the walls of my prison. I could hear the wind outside the walls, pushing and shoving at the land, the trees, pulling at the roof top to get inside. I was afraid of the wind as I had been afraid of a mad father home from an all-night drunk.

Since his recovery, father had become extremely religious. We had become members of a small, nonsectarian church that preached letter of the law. Recently, with a new minister, there had been a huge influx of new members who were more extreme. They were all aloof and very clannish.

A month after admission I was transferred to a treatment ward.

I found myself in the portion of hospital with the pyramid rooves. I was introduced to several nurses, and the therapists with whom I would be having sessions. My eyes were blurry, and it was hard to focus.

I noticed that a well-dressed, shaven-headed man wearing a geometric patterned tie seemed to startle when he saw me. He looked almost like he was spellbound. He took several almost trance-like steps towards me, but then seemed to catch himself and quickly walked away.

He stopped at a discrete distance away and appeared to be perusing a medical file. I could see him discretely peeking over the file and I somehow felt drawn to him; like two magnets being compelled together by invisible forces.

They escorted me to my room. I sat on the bed, and the charge nurse gave me a fresh set of hospital gowns and a robe. She told me to change and put my soiled robes in the hamper, and that she would be back with the doctor in a few minutes.

I wearily looked around the room, everything was metal. The room was small, and halfway up the wall there were small white tiles in an irregular pattern. I changed as I looked out the warbled glass of the windows and tried to see past the black bars. I folded my gown and underclothes and placed them in the