Candlemoth (8 page)

    He
didn't wait for an answer; seemed he didn't really need to know that I was
listening, only that I was there.

    'The
first part they called The Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter. They
had to make it sound complex so that people would take them seriously. They
wanted the top people involved, all the Freemason Brotherhood, to bring about
this mass-trauma, mind-control assault against the body politic of the U.S.
They had a guy called Peter Kern, a Freemason himself, and they asked him to
build a gate. The site of the gate was called The Trinity in Mexico, the
thirty-third degree of the north parallel latitude. There's an old road down
there called the Jornada del Muerto, The Journey of the Dead Man. So Kern built
the gate, and they called it The Gate With A Thousand Doors, and once he'd completed
it they ceremonially decapitated him. They did some other shit too, occult
shit, all along that latitude through Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico.'

    Schembri
smiled and winked. He knew what he was talking about even if I didn't.

    'I'll
tell ya something else. These nuts believe in something called the Kundalini
fire serpent. Say that it lives in the body of a man, and the serpent crosses
the thirty-three segments of the human spine which they consider is the vehicle
of fiery ascent. Thirty-three is also the highest degree in Freemasonry.'

    He
nodded and winked once more as if everything was now becoming clear.

    'The
second stage of the The Creation and Destruction of Primordial Matter also took
place at The Trinity, the Place of Fire, with the detonation of the first
atomic bomb.'

    Schembri
leaned back and smiled. He raised his spoon. 'They knew what they were doing,
see? They knew exactly what they were doing.'

    He
lowered his spoon and used it to stir up the mess of food on his tray.

    I
wanted to ask him what he meant, what he knew of what had happened to me.

    'The
third stage was The Killing of the King,' he said, interrupting my thought.
'Ten miles south of the thirty- third degree of north parallel latitude between
the Trinity River and the Triple Underpass in Dallas… and that was Dealey
Plaza, the site of the first Masonic temple in Dallas. Used to be called Bloody
Elm Street, and here they brought the King of Camelot, John Fitzgerald Kennedy,
and they sacrificed him.'

    Schembri
was looking out towards the mass of people that surrounded us. He nodded his
head slowly.

    'They
killed the King, you see? Killed him right there in front of the world. And
that was the greatest trick of all.'

    Schembri
looked back at me.

    'They
had this picture from that day in Dallas. You've seen this picture, three bums,
three hobos in custody. Hobos with good haircuts and clean shoes. Those three
guys were just released without identification, though folks interested in what
really happened have always believed that there was some significance to the
presence of those men. I'll tell you who they were. They were symbols, Masonic
symbols, because every time the Freemasons kill someone they have three
unworthy craftsmen present, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum. They were there. They
had to be there. They were as much a part of the thing as anything else.'

    Schembri
smiled again, that same wry expression that said more than could ever be
expressed in words.

    'Kennedy
wasn't killed for political reasons. They didn't kill him because he was trying
to stop the Vietnam War or close down Bell Helicopters. It wasn't even because
he was trying to stop the segregation of the blacks. They killed him because
they could. They wanted the world to know they could take the most powerful man
in the world and blow his head off on TV… and that no-one could do anything
about it. Who actually shot him will never be known. Those details will die
with the people that pulled the triggers and the folks who organized it. I
should imagine the gunmen themselves were dead within an hour of the incident.
Oswald was no more responsible than you were. Kennedy got caught in a
triangulation of fire, a classic CIA strategy. The entire flood of disinformation
that followed, the CIA-Mafia-Anti-Castro-Castro-KGB-Texas Right Wing theories…
all of it was planned a year before the assassination. The people that put
Kennedy there took him away again.'

    Schembri
looked away, for a moment an expression of sadness in his eyes.

    'You
see everything changed after November '63. The whole world changed. America
started down the tubes. Quality of life deteriorated. Music got louder, drugs
got into the mainstream culture, even down to the clothes people wore. No longer
cotton and natural fabrics, but artificial, garish-colored, ugly. America
realized that whoever could kill their President in broad daylight could do
anything they wished. No longer was there one man, the Chief Executive of the
nation, but some unelected invisible fraternity. And that same fraternity gave
us LSD and psychiatry, free love, pornography, violence on the TV, everything
that made it okay to be nuts.'

    Schembri
nodded his head.

    'They
took away the King of Camelot and gave us the Wizard of Oz. We exist in a
palace of unreality, we are manipulated by invisible hands, and always in the
distance is the awareness that somewhere there are people who know who we are,
what we are doing, what we will do next, and when necessary they push the buttons
and pull the strings and it all slots into place as it was designed.'

    I
opened my mouth to speak but Schembri went on.

    My
food was already cold.

    'Kennedy
was a visual leader, a man who won the hearts and minds of a nation through the
TV set. People often said that Kennedy was elected because of how he looked -
the all-American boy, the stand-up guy, the clean-cut military man. He was the
personification of all our mothers' sons, the boy our fathers wanted us to be,
and we identified with him. They killed him, they killed us, one and the same
thing, and with that single, simple action they took away our identity and our
vision. They managed to do to an entire nation what they had been doing to
individuals for years. It was their greatest coup, a moment of sheer
brilliance, and it made them feel bold and brave and committed to continuing
their plan to introduce the New World Order. They even advertise themselves on
the back of a dollar bill. The Eye In The Pyramid, the symbol of enclosed awareness,
and beneath it those same words in Latin, New World Order. Even George
Washington knew these people existed, and when he was asked about them he said
they held diabolical tenets, and that their objective was a separation of the
people from their government. Well, they succeeded, succeeded beyond their own
wildest dreams, and the government behind the government is healthier and more
robust than it ever was.'

    Schembri
leaned forward, his voice hushed. 'Ku Klux Klan, same shit you got yourself
into, kid… they're inside it, all through that stuff.'

    I
felt my eyes widen. I attempted to ask a question, to elicit something further
from him, but he just went on talking as if I wasn't there.

    'And
they hated Kennedy, hated him for speaking to Martin Luther King and Ralph
Abernathy, for sending Federal Marshals down to the University of Mississippi
back in September of '62. A man called Prescott Bush, Senator from Connecticut,
best buddies with National Security Director Gordon Gray, he was straight out
of the Order of Skull & Bones at Yale, both of them playing golf with
Eisenhower. And Prescott's lawyer, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State,
and Dulles' brother Alan was head of the CIA. Gray was made head of the
Psychological Strategy Board in 1951, and then he was assistant to Eisenhower
for national security affairs. Gray sat between Ike and the CIA and all the
U.S. military forces. Gray was charged with protecting Eisenhower from any
backlash encountered from CIA covert operations. Nixon's connections to Bush
went back to '46.'

    Schembri
sighed and shook his head resignedly.

    'Prescott
Bush put an ad in a Los Angeles newspaper for the Orange County Republican
Party. They wanted a young man to run for Congress. Nixon applied and got the
job. He became Vice-President in 1952. In 1960 our friend Nixon was securing
funds for his run at the presidency. There beside him was Prescott Bush,
Congressman Gerald Ford and Prescott's son, George Bush. When Nixon got in in
'68 it was payback time. He made Prescott's son, George, Chairman of the
Republican National Committee and ambassador to China.'

    Schembri
frowned, leaned forward.

    'And
here we are, a handful of years later, and evidently Mr. Richard Milhous Nixon
upset someone badly, because they took him out too. Bullshit Watergate, they
have always and forever been in each other's pockets. They record everything,
they swap tapes at Christmas for Christ's sake, the Intelligence Community is
the Intelligence
Community…
. National Security, CIA, Division Five of
the FBI, the Justice Department, the Attorney General's Office, Office of Naval
Intelligence, they're all the same goddamned thing. Nixon pissed someone off,
they take him out; Gerald Ford steps in and does whatever Nixon wouldn't, and
everything comes back to battery.'

    Schembri
nodded as if acknowledging himself, and spent a minute or so eating.

    I
wanted to ask something… anything. What did he know about the Ku Klux Klan?
What had he heard about me and why I was there? Did he know Nathan? Did he
understand what had happened? I had so many questions crowding my mind they
seemed to bottleneck. I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

    'You
remember Kennedy?' he said.

    I
nodded.

    'How
old were you then?' Schembri asked.

    A moment's
mental calculation. 'Seventeen.'

    Schembri
smiled. 'Hell, you were just a kid.'

    I
nodded.

    'And
you remember where you were, what you were doing when you heard?'

    I
nodded again. I remembered as if it were yesterday. Everyone remembers where
they were and what they were doing when they heard.

    'Helluva
thing,' he said quietly. 'Just a helluva thing.'

    He
fell silent for a moment.

    I
clenched my fists. 'What do you know?' I asked. 'What were you going to say
about why I'm here?'

    He
winked. 'Same time… same channel,' he whispered, leaning towards me across the
table. He started up from his chair. 'See ya tomorrow eh?'

    I
watched him go, my mouth open, my eyes wide. I felt awkward and ignorant and
insubstantial. He disappeared into the throng heading for the doors and I felt
nothing.

    January
of '63. The year started with fifty dead as Vietcong guerrillas shot down five
helicopters in the Mekong Delta. In February Kennedy warned Cuba off once more
as they fired rockets at a U.S. boat. On the upside, the Supreme Court released
one hundred and eighty-seven blacks jailed for a protest in South Carolina.
Martin Luther King was arrested once more in Alabama. Castro went to see
Khrushchev.

    These
were important times, times of change and upheaval, but however significant
these events may have appeared they would be blown away in a heartbeat compared
to what was coming our way.

    In
June Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader, was shot, and with Governor George
Wallace of Alabama still arguing with Kennedy, still defying the court order to
open the university to negroes, it seemed that these wars would continue
endlessly, that just as progress was made another event would turn it backwards
upon itself and undo whatever good had been done.

    By
August of '63 Kennedy was a weary man. He'd lost his second son only thirty-six
hours after that son was born. A march of two hundred thousand people came to
Washington, and there in the masses were Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, Judy
Garland and Bob Dylan. The world was watching and listening, waiting to see
what would happen, and Kennedy knew it.

    In
September Governor Wallace ordered his State Troopers to seal off Tuskegee High
School, and one hundred and eighty-nine negroes were arrested for protesting.

    As
the Senate Committee listened to Joseph Valachi deliver the goods on organized
crime, as the U.S. officially recognized the South Vietnamese government,
discussions about a certain incident that was to occur in Texas occupied the
minds of a few men behind closed doors, and the world would change irrevocably.

    Nathan
Verney and I, however, were consumed with
girls.