DR. JAY
He's been here before. It comes to his mind as he steps off the plane at the Shirley Bassey International Airport, this intense feeling of deja vu that persists on the scenic ride to his hotel room. Seeing many curious black faces for the first time, and yet again, confuses him, drawing him closer to the heart of this quaint little metropolis. Is there something in the wind calling out to him, inviting him to breathe in the clean, fresh air, to hear subliminal whispers that say, he's been here before?
It isn't a fleeting fancy, or the type of reminder people get when they stumble back into a really good bookstore. This is a happy daze; like a soldier who never expects to make it back home, suddenly back home. Which doesn't make any sense at all, since his real ancestral home is very much in Birmingham.
"Oga na dis be ya fust time hia abi? This is twenty nine days, to the night of Fust Rain, Oga! Fust Rain! You sabi wetin I dey talk? This season, na serious time for hia! Dangerous time! Abeg no dey do J.J.C for road, oh! As I take see how you wan waka comot dey parambulate for area." This, from the hotel madam the very next day, after she thoroughly inspects his hiking gear with big, bulging eyes.
Twenty nine days to the night of First Rain?
"I see. Please, what is J.J.C?"
Its a 'Johny' just coming into town and not knowing his left from his right, showing off his ignorance and doing things the locals didn't do...
"Oya make I tell una dis tory wey happun for hia last year! See dis oyibo dey come from yankee jus mumu as una dey do, come dey yanga for road wit all dis kyn kaya una dey show, nah yahoo boys wey catch am put am for hole e siddun gidigba dey wait for gbese and dem take juju kpafuka his head oh! Oga, dey use am build house finish, troway am for bush, e dey waka for road nah, nah him be zombie for dis area! Nah why I dey tell you say no dey show mumu dey para like JJC for Naijah oh! Dis is Naijah!"
This is Nigeria.
He is so captivated by the way she murders the English language, that he doesn't at all question, how it is that he understands her so well, not until his reply escapes his mouth, shocking the both of them, "Dem for kukuma kill me nah, as I no get shi shi for dem! Mama, I be Akpruka, I no dey draw nyiansh to chop iron, I'm a British Boy confirmed, we no dey carry last, na dem wey go dombaleh!"
He leaves her with her big mouth hanging open, in a similar state of amazement himself. So! He is more than fluent in pidgin! What other impossible thing will he discover about himself, in Canaan? He wondered, if, at the end of this final mission, he'd still recognize himself. Can it be... that without his knowledge or consent, his government has turned him into a clone? Has he been black zoned, or is it... PTSD? Is this a melt down? He leads, and they follow. That's how it's always been, except this time it's different; they need him. Dr. Jay suspects that there is a secret knowledge only he possesses, a certain information that must first be unlocked, rediscovered, remembered, for them to get access to the virus. His eyes scan the sky in search of spy drones. They think that he knows where the African Codex, is. Are they watching him right now? This mission feels personal, because, it is.
Personal.
Dr. Jay is already half way to his destination, when he realizes that he didn't ask for directions. He stands still for a minute, dumbfounded. How does he know the way to this tunnel? All structures and edifices are new to him, yet, every step he takes is so hauntingly familiar. He does not have a google map, gprs locator, or local tourist guide but he sees it in his mind's eye, as an old faded memory. Dr. Jay continues his solitary trek like a man first made from clay, whose very primal essence is one with the earth, his footfalls aligning with the molecular trails of an energy signature in dust fragments from the past, invisible air waves stuck in-between the myriad fabrics of the layered atmosphere, a pantomime, resilient through the patient interweaving of time, a route so complex, so well hidden, just waiting for him to walk right back into old footprints re-stepping expired steps, his road rugged boots pounding the ashphalt till he gets to a rocky mountain passage, till finally, at last, he arrives in old town, a wide billboard at the forked crossroads calling it, WaterTown.
Salem Hartford tails him at a measured distance, dressed very much like a tourist in khaki shorts, a tee shirt and back pack, this time with his hair hidden under a tight yellow bandana and his eyes behind large sunglasses. Dr. Jay almost doesn't recognize him, because of his female companion. She's a tall, leggy blonde, and they look like the perfect couple. It is his first time, of being both the hunter and the hunted. The breakfast party are never too far from him; this makes the mission very, very personal. Dr. Jay sighs deeply, trying to come to terms with this new obnoxious reality. He could understand if he had become the target of ... not the British empire, but someone, within the corridors of power. But...
MI6 knows he's been here before. They know when, why, and how. They know a part of him he hasn't met yet. It only gets creepier. He will never know what they know, once they get what they want. The breakfast party will ensure it. He leads, they follow, until his director, General Charles Rothschild Pitt, gives the extermination order.
Dr. Jay examines the events of his childhood, as he walks down, left of the crossroads. His mother he loved beyond life itself, a lady so occupied with the tenets of her faith, that even when her husband, without her knowledge or consent, tested the voracity of a scientific, breakthrough pandemic vaccine in her blood, by first administering the virus strain in her cup of coffee, with her last, dying breath, she forgave him, while he, her son Justice, then a seventeen year old boy, could not.
How do you tell a teenager that you killed his mother for the advancement of the British empire, in the field of medical science? His father did it, by confessing to his dying wife in his only son's presence, and later, casually confirming it over a bitter cup of coffee.
While working through his rage, young Justice murders his father's entire laboratory staff, with just the press of a button, on a remote for an explosive device he himself assembles, in the dark and forgotten confines of his lonely room. He told himself he did it for the advancement of the British Justice system, of course.
An invasive, endless, clandestine monitoring by British secret intelligence, is in fact, the only reason why his father survived the blast. His father, a nobel prize award winning scientist, had employed fifty world class geniuses, as his laboratory staff. Secret intelligence operatives tipped him off five minutes before the blast and, only him. When he very quickly left his office on an impromptu lunch, he'd gone out of the building, alone. As he calmly ate his bloody beef steak rare, his workers were bombed to their sudden, and violent, unsuspecting deaths. It was easy, for a seventeen year old son, to blame him for this carnage, also. The police never interrogated Jay, but the British Military Intelligence recruited him.
He never saw his apathetical, avaricious father again, but by the time Professor Justice Benedict Hall died peacefully in his sleep, at the ripe old age of eighty four, Dr. Jay has already killed more than fifty-five people, all over the world, working as a grade A, top Secret Agent, for the advancement of the British empire, of course.
Before the madness began, he was just an ordinary boy going about the vast halls of his family's ancestral castle, often studying life size grand paintings of two centuries worth of Justice Benedict Halls. His favourite painting was captioned "1891. Lord Admiral, Navy Commander, HMS Battle Cruiser Stone Frigate, Gladiator," but then, the art canvas itself remains blank to this day.
A blank painting. An empty canvas. The servants gossiped in hushed whispers. Treason. Disgrace. Controversy. Even murder, and gold. His father refused to even talk about him, the family black sheep.
But here, in West Africa, was a castle built in 1891, bearing his name, Justice Hall. Here, is where General Charles Rothschilds Pitt, sent him. to retrieve the African Codex. The stage is set, with Rodney Sheldon, Salem Hartford and Tom Price, constantly tailing him. Is this his last scene, are these his last acts? Dr. Jay wants to know why. He needs to know about 1891; about why this mission feels like he's come round, full circle.
Ten minutes after diving into the ocean, when he finds the tunnel, he doesn't enter it. He swims back up very quickly, leaving the water as fast as he can, being propelled by sheer terror. Just like that, it happened. With the blink of his eyes, all of a sudden, he knows there is something... down there. He remembers. And he can't get out of the water fast enough.
He remembers praying for a crazy high tide, so that the sea can flood the holed in hellish tunnel that runs deep under the earth, opening up above land, at the foot of a hill. He prayed, for the tide to flood in, for the water to push him higher, because he was trapped at the upper end, with no way to reach his freedom. It was after his fingers got badly bruised and bloody, from carving out grip size clefts up the walls about twenty feet high, that he'd heard it. A loud surrounding spine chilling, terrifying hiss of a Titanoboa.
This vile prehistoric terror, more myth than legend, is what was in there. The tunnel, is the hole, and the hole, is a sacrificial pit; not everyone knows it exists, and not all who worship the titan, know exactly what it is, that they worship. Dr. Jay remembered it waiting for him and Charlotte, quietly, for six days. He remembers smelling it as it came up. On day seven. Slowly. It's tongue alone, could snatch them both in a strangle hold, and drag them down. No spear! No sword! No weapon! Not even a toothpick!
As he sits up on his hunches, panting heavily on the sandy shore, Dr. Jay remembers pulling Charlotte's body into an upright stance beside him while he pressed himself flat against the rough earth wall. His left hand tried to wedge her steady but she'd gotten stone stiff and real heavy. The worst part of this long nightmare is that it was yet a bright and early morning; the sun's rays split the dark into sections partitioned by fat beams of light. He could see and be seen, clearly. He remembered looking up at the top, so far from him! He remembered closing his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them, it was to look into the two enormous, slit, yellow orbs of that fossil reptile. Each almond shaped eye was the size of a child's coffin. It's head was a little way out, in width, taking up a third of the circular space. In this monumental quiet, as man and beast froze time, Dr. Jay remembers that he forgot to breathe. His heart, for the first time in his entire life, was totally overcome with fear. And then, just like that, it was gone.
He breathed again.
But then he remembers that he hadn't quite fully exhaled, before the earth abruptly shifted with a loud bang. He nearly fell right into the dark slanting descent, but Char's body blocked his, again. And again, the titan's head hit the tight yawning of the second hole, and the earth shook with tremors as sand fell in grainy trickles from loosened corners in the crude, archaic cavern, and he scrambled up against the wall, hooking an arm around Charlotte's neck, while gripping a clawed out pocket dent in the earth with his other bloody hand before the titan's head hit fiercely, and with more anger, again.
Harder.
Dr. Jay sits shivering on the sandy shore, remembering things he has never, ever ever experienced before. Who put these memories in his head? Who is Charlotte? And no matter how many lives a man can live, past or present, that beast... should not exist. He couldn't even process that part of the memory yet. This mission is beginning to look less like a mission, and more like fate. What other horrific surprise does this city hold in store for him?
When he gets to his hotel room, he takes a hot shower, and orders for hot coffee. The hotel madam brings it, her big bulging eyes noting him in his humble seat by the window, and surveying the spartan lodgings for any new or strange additions... parts of endangered animal species, like elephant tusks, or historical artefacts...
"Welcome! Nah hot coffee una wan drink for dis kyne hot sun so?"
He confirms his order with a nod of his head, his right hand waving her in, "Abeg, bring am come, as e dey hot!"
She wobbles into his room with a tray, setting his hot coffee before him on a small reading table, "Hmm! You sure say, you be Oyimbo?" But she leaves before he can answer. Of course, she has no way of knowing that he is still shivering in fear from a memory surge at the tunnel, where he went deep down into the water. The hot coffee is for his nerves. The bitter black beverage burns it's way down his throat, tasting like alacrity and alertness. He swallows a few more sips, pulling his phone out of his back pocket to dial the third most secret number in the world.
"Tell me the truth, Rodney."
Rodney replies in a merry tone, "Ask me the question, Jay."
"Am I already black zoned?"
There is a slight pause at the other end of the line, then, "Why do you think so?"
"Maybe my alias? Of all the disguises to give me, I have to play a psychic detective?"
"A psychic detective, Jay, is a person who investigates any mysterious crimes by using his purported paranormal psychic abilities."
"What abilities, Rodney?"
Rodney coughs, "Whatever the department decides!"
"Like my new, out of the blue memories? Did the unit mess with my head, Rodney?"
"You have... new memories?"
"Are the three of you tailing me, unofficially?"
"I admit that I have access to your file, and it is before me right now. You studied some really cool subjects for your Ph.D; post-cognition... is this the paranormal perception of the past? Psychometrics... isn't this information that can be physically gained from objects?"
Learning more about certain abilities, like telepathy, does not make him, telepathic. Jay scowls, "Don't change the topic, Rodney. I'm currently being bombarded, with very detailed memories of one of my ancestors, a man who lived in this city, in 1891."
"Have you considered, well, Metempsychosis...?"
The transmigration of the soul, a.k.a. reincarnation? Yes, Dr. Jay has thought, is in fact thinking, about it. But he will never be able to accept it as universal biblical doctrine because, of his dear, beloved mother. Personally, he was not practicing this faith, and everything he knows, he sort of gleaned it from his dear mother. Reincarnation is one of her most successful debate topics, just within her small social circle, a few friends, at tea parties she organized in their blue living room, back home when home was home, in Birmingham Castle...
He'd sit on an arm chair and stuff his mouth full of scones, sweet cakes and sumptuous pies, absorbing the atomic blast of every verbal missile the researcher ladies shot over his head at each other, from opposing sides of the sunny blue room, a million years ago. Of course, mother always won...
The idea that the soul is immortal, is basic to the belief in reincarnation, but before man becomes a living soul he must receive the breath of life, like when a new born baby gives it's first cry, that awareness is in fact, a part of God's Spirit. Else, why are we told in Genesis 3:19: for dust you are, and to dust you shall return? Its all over the bible, what exactly we are! Mortal souls, en-route to the eternal damnation! And yet, it's all over the bible, what we are called to be! Immortal souls in abundance of life! 2 Samuel 14:14 says that God devises means, that his banished be not expelled from him. This is salvation, in Christ. Tell me about the transformative power of God's Word! Tell me how The Spirit of God can quicken a man! But don't talk about reincarnation! Friends! It is appointed for a man to die once, then, the judgement! Unless of course, we are not talking about men at all. In this world, both the wheat and tares co-exist after all...
"Jay?"
Dr. Jay blinks the past away, "Yeah?" His Mother always told him, that he could find her anytime he needed her, in Christ. But what does this mean? Let's eat the Word at the HRBC (McFoy House,) Every Wednesday, 5 p.m., read a large billboard at the crossroads in WaterTown. He needs his mother's clear wisdom. He has to get into Christ to get it. Maybe it was time...
"Metempsychosis?"
"Rodney; you did not answer my question."
Rodney coughs again, "It is, eh," he sighs, "-its beyond my security clearance to know the answer. This much I can tell you, Jay, your file is with the clean up crew."
After a slight pause, Dr. Jay laughs dryly, "What does that make you?"
Best friends in kindergarten, best friends in college, best buddies in Afghanistan, well now, it didn't seem to matter anymore, that he found him in pieces in the battle front, and extracted him from that mounting carnage, to a team of military medical experts. Right now, Rodney was just doing his job. Dr. Jay drank his coffee, and fell asleep. His body has its own agenda, no matter how cleverly he tries to avoid certain situations, or certain potential triggers, it seems that lately, he sleeps when he sleeps, and dreams what he dreams...
He took over the helm from Doobly, manning the wheel whilst searching for signs in the sky. The mighty battleship steadies almost immediately, even as the wind tossed waves seem to stabilize. But it does not last. Fifteen minutes is all the warning the sky gives them, before bursting wide open, another ocean falling down upon them. Vane comes to relieve him, but he has to see clearly through this wall of vengeful rain. He proceeds to jump up the very edge rail overlooking the angry, churning ocean, nimbly climbing up the rope netting that is fixed there, up to the platform the sailors call crow's nest. Effortlessly, he hoists his huge figure into the big wooden barrel and rights himself, peering out through the pelting curtain, before he suddenly shouts in alarm. But the raging ocean drowns out the sound of his baritone...