The Medusa Ritual
A Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigation
by
CW Hawes
A tulpa. Art fraud. The origin of those too life-like statues. And Dotty Kemper. What about Dotty?
Read on for more adventure!
9
When Mostyn, Bardon, and Jones entered the conference room, they found everyone in a tizzy. It took Mostyn only a moment to determine why. For on the wall opposite the windows, in bright red, were the words the man with the mask had said to him.
Winifred Petrie, on seeing Bardon, pointed at the wall and asked, “What does it say?”
Bardon replied with a question, “When did the words appear?”
“About ten minutes ago,” Otto Stoppen, the assistant librarian, answered.
“That’s about the time you were talking to Dr Kemper, my boy. Wasn’t it?” Bardon said to Mostyn.
“Yes, sir, it was.”
“He has a flair for showmanship,” Bardon said.
“Who does, sir?” NicAskill asked.
“Our adversary,” Bardon replied. To everyone, he said, “Please take your seats. We need to make an important decision.”
Everyone sat and the room became quiet.
Bardon pointed to the writing on the wall. “We are not dealing with an ordinary thug. The words mean,” and Bardon told the team his rough translation of the message on the wall. “He calls himself a summoner, which means he is follower, a fanatical follower of the Great Old Ones. He is dangerous to the extreme. We don’t know what he knows, but he knows enough to suspect Special Agent Mostyn is someone who might thwart him.”
“What about Dr Kemper?” Dr Hammerschmidt asked.
“Our nameless adversary has her prisoner. The price for her freedom is Special Agent Mostyn’s departure.”
“Dr Bardon,” NicAskill raised her hand, and Bardon indicated she should continue. “How do we know he’ll let Dr Kemper go?”
Bardon shrugged. “We don’t. So the question before us is, do we give him what he wants and hope he releases Dr Kemper? Or do we ignore him?”
“If we ignore him,” Mostyn began, “Dotty said she’d be given to his grandson as a mistress or wife — and she added the grandson is apparently not normal.”
“What does that mean?” Jones asked.
“She didn’t know,” Mostyn answered.
“If this guy is a fan of the Great Old Ones,” Baker said, “then his grandson not being normal might not actually be something we want to contemplate.”
“Indeed, Mr Baker,” Bardon said.
“If we assume the masked man doesn’t know about us, then maybe we can deceive him,” Mostyn volunteered.
Bardon smiled. “Yes, we could. Do you have anything specific in mind?”
“A tulpa.”
“Ah, yes, that might work quite nicely,” Bardon said. He thought a moment before continuing. “You won’t be able to make one, because we don’t have months at our disposal for you to learn how to do so. I will have to create one that looks like you.”
“You mind my asking what this tulpa thing is?” Jones said.
“Not at all, Special Agent Jones,” Bardon said. “Tulpa creation is a Tibetan Buddhist practice. Normally the tulpa begins life in your mind. It more or less becomes a sentient being.”
“You mean like another person in my head?” Jones asked.
“Yes,” Bardon replied. “If the person creating the tulpa has sufficient power, the tulpa can actually take shape and be seen by others, as well as interact with them. The tulpa can also be sent on missions.”
“So you’re going to create this tulpa thing to look like Mostyn and send it home on a plane,” Dr Petrie said.
“That’s the idea,” Mostyn said.
“Will it work?” Petrie asked.
Bardon smiled. “Yes, I think it will work. Time, however, is of the essence. We need to get started right away.”
“Then let’s do it,” Mostyn said.
“And we’ll also find out if this guy is honorable and will release Dr Kemper,” Baker said.
***
Mostyn, Jones, and Dr Stoppen were in the room with Dr Bardon. Outside the Kymbra NicAskill stood guarding the room from any intruders. The remaining team members were in the conference room watching what was going on via their computers.
To Mostyn, seeing Dr Rafe Bardon in his three-piece suit sitting in the Lotus Position, was comical. Except what they were trying to do wasn’t comical at all, but a matter of life or death. Dotty Kemper’s life or death for starters.
For an hour, Mostyn watched Bardon sit there on the bed with his eyes closed and his lips barely moving. He had no idea if Bardon had been successful or not. Then a filmy white shape began forming on the bed next to him. The thing looked as tangible as a stream of smoke from a smoldering campfire. And Mostyn smiled. Bardon had created a tulpa. Now the question was could he make the thing solid in time to catch the last flight out of Los Angeles.
The minutes passed into hours. The filmy ghost-like shape didn’t move, nor did it gain any substantial substance. Mostyn stared at the clock. They had but three and a half hours to go before midnight. He glanced at the tulpa and then took a second look. The thing was no longer a smoke-like wraith. It now looked human. In fact, the thing looked a lot like him. The creature was still transparent, but it did have shape and form and looked like his identical twin.
More minutes slipped by. While Mostyn watched, the tulpa gradually became denser.
“It looks just like you, Mostyn,” Dr Stoppen said.
Mostyn chuckled. “The twin I never had.”
“I think Dr Bardon is almost finished,” Stoppen said. “I can’t see through it anymore.”
“You’re right,” Mostyn agreed.
The tulpa opened its eyes. “Hello Special Agent in Charge Pierce Mostyn, and hello to you, Dr Stoppen.”
“It sounds just like you, Mostyn,” Stoppen exclaimed.
A look of disapproval crossed the creature’s face. “I am not an ‘it’. I’m a ‘he’.”
Mostyn laughed. “He even wants to choose his own pronouns.”
Bardon’t eyes opened. “For all practical purposes, he is you, Pierce, my boy. He is developing his own personality, and will continue to do so.”
“I am ready for this mission,” the tulpa said.
“Very good, Special Agent Mostyn,” Bardon said. “Let us be on our way then.”
10
Mostyn and Bardon, both in heavy disguise, watched the tulpa board the plane with no problems. Mostyn scanned the airport crowd looking for some sign of the masked man’s henchmen, but saw nothing unusual in the people waiting to get on the plane or who were sitting nearby.
“If there here,” he whispered to Bardon, “they must be in disguise too.”
“They may not even by visible,” Bardon whispered back. “It’s also possible no one is here and the Summoner is watching remotely.”
Mostyn nodded. He looked at his watch. Half-past eleven. They’d met the deadline. Once the door to the jet was closed that was it, the tulpa was on his way to New York and Dotty should be released. He clenched his fists. And then he was going after the bastard.
The door to the jetway closed. “Well, Pierce, my boy, let’s head back. We have a lot to talk about.”
Mostyn and Bardon exited the airport and walked out to the parking ramp, where Jones was waiting with the sedan. Once in the car, Bardon began talking.
“Let me bring you up to date, Pierce, my boy. You were drugged when the reports were sent out, and with everything happening…” He lifted his hands. “It will be simpler if I brief you.”
“I can read the details later, sir.”
“Indeed. We ran Mr Cortado and Mr Salzman through our database and all those we have access to. Thanks to Special Agent NicAskill’s photographs, we were also able to run their faces through the databases as well. We got hits all around. Mr Salzman is an experienced con artist. His known aliases are Milton Gray, Gary Salzman, Gray M Salzman, and Shlomo Salzman.”
“What’s his racket?”
“Just about everything, but art fraud seems to be his specialty.”
Mostyn nodded. “Explains why he’s hooked up with Cortado.”
“It does, at least in part. Mr Cortado is also something of a con artist, although nowhere near as successful as Mr Salzman. Mr Cortado is suspected of forging the works of Pilar Hernandez-Vega, Joan Miró, and Leonora Varo.”
“Why only suspected?”
“Because the possible victims, thus far, are not willing to come forward and admit they were conned.”
“I see.”
“He also tried to impersonate the Hungarian artist Lorine Kiss, at a time when Mr Kiss was unable to leave Hungary.”
“I take it he got caught.”
“He did. Mr Cortado had the misfortune of an acquaintance of Kiss’s visit the show, and the woman blew the whistle on him, as you Americans say.”
Mostyn chuckled. “What happened?”
“The scam of course was discovered. The paintings were confiscated and Mr Cortado got five years probation. That’s when he left New York for California.”
“He could do that?”
Bardon shrugged. “He got someone here in California to offer him a job as an art restorer. Bogus, I’m sure. But it worked, and here he is.”
“Very interesting. So what’s with the statues?”
Bardon rubbed his hands together. “Ah, the statues. As near as our science staff can determine is that they are genuinely made of stone. A type of marble. And that they were probably once living beings. At least that is what the sculptors said who examined the statues. They couldn’t be carved. In addition, we lifted fingerprints from the woman.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, That’s how fine the detail is.”
“Amazing.”
“It is.”
“Could you identify her?”
“Yes, because we are able to access the California DMV records and the fingerprints they require licenses.”
“Is that legal, sir?”
“Need to know, my boy, need to know.”
“I take that as a no.”
Bardon merely smiled, and went on. “Her name was Fiorella Josephina Flores-Hernández. She lost her job about a year ago, her apartment four months later, and has apparently been homeless the past three or four months.”
“And now she’s dead.”
“Sadly, yes. I asked Special Agent NicAskill and Dr Petrie to talk to her family. Hopefully they’ll have something for us tomorrow.”
“Anything further on the book?”
“We found the high end bookseller in New York. He told us he got the book from a dealer in Munich, who bought it from a rare book collector’s estate. Apparently the children were selling off everything to get cash.”
Mostyn laughed. “The Munich dealer probably got a good price. I can’t believe the heirs knew what they had on their hands.”
“I quite agree, my boy.”
“So how did the book get out here?”
“The New York dealer has a select clientele for certain esoteric items, and one of those clients lived out here. A Beverly Fitzroy McCandless.”
“Where does she live?”
“Not a ‘she’, my boy.”
“A man with the name ‘Beverly’?”
“Yes,” Bardon replied, with a smile on his face. “Long before the fairer sex appropriated the name, Beverly was a male name. Quite British, you know.”
“Huh. Learn something new every day. So where does he live.”
“He lives nowhere. He was murdered some three months after he bought the book and the book is missing. Apparently stolen.”
“So we still don’t know who has it.”
“No, we don’t. Although Mr McCandless kept a diary and in the diary recorded getting several phone calls from someone who wanted the book and was willing to offer McCandless a lot of money for it.”
“And his turning down the offer resulted in his death.”
“So it seems, my boy, so it seems.”
Jones pulled the limo into the hotel garage and stopped by a door. Bardon and Mostyn got out of the vehicle, maintaining their disguises and walked to a room registered to one Diamond Jim Brady. Once inside, Bardon texted a message on his phone. Two people looking like hotel cleaning staff, moved down the hall. The equipment in the cleaning cart swept the corridor for bugs and spy cameras. When they found none, they texted an all clear back to Bardon.
“Good. We can get out of these disguises,” Bardon said.
“If it’s okay with you, I’ll keep mine on. Just in case.”
Bardon nodded, and removed his. When he was back to looking like himself, he and Mostyn walked to the conference room. Jones had gotten there before them.
“The tulpa boarded the plane,” Bardon told the team. “Now we wait.”
“So we have no idea when or where our masked man will release Dr Kemper?” Baker said.
“Unfortunately, no, Mr Baker, we do not,” Bardon answered.
The OUP director’s phone chimed. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. Bardon turned to Mostyn. “Check your phone, Mr Mostyn. Our tulpa received a text on his phone which we cloned from yours, so you should have it as well.”
Mostyn looked at his phone and read the text. A cloud descended on his face.
“What is it, Boss?” Jones asked.
“The bastard has decided to keep Dotty. It seems he has a further use for her.”
To Be Continued!
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