Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (52 page)

“Another absinthe?” Lloyd asks.

“Sure–why not…” Gordon says. He’s feeling magnanimous… and oddly furry, like tiny green nerve filaments are sprouting from his skin and waving about like the shy tendrils of a sea anemone.

“What happened to the Templars in prison is almost too sad and tedious to go into,” Lloyd says, mixing a second drink of his own. “The Inquisition’s methods were brutal. Two- or three-dozen men died at their hands from torture and suffering. Knights were stretched on the rack until their joints ripped from the sockets. Others had their feet basted in fat, then held over flames until their bones fell out. Three cardinals visiting Jacques de Molay behind bars were horrified to see large patches of skin ripped from his back and stomach. Molay revoked his confession in front of the cardinals and begged to receive justice from the Pope. But by then it was too late. Word of the Grand Master’s confession had spread, encouraging other Templars to make confessions of their own. To give just one well-documented example: of the 138 Templars arrested in Paris, 134 had admitted to some or all of the charges against them. Retracting those confessions would be dangerous. Under the statutes of the Inquisition, anyone who later revoked their confession was considered a relapsed heretic, and heretics were burned alive at the stake. It didn’t matter that those confessions had been obtained under torture. Truly, once the Inquisition had you in its clutches, you were in a ‘damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t’ situation.”

Gordon unexpectedly finds himself tearing up
. Why is the world so full of angry, self-righteous assholes?
Everywhere you look you find deluded hypocrites, bent on persecution. A greedy King, a two-faced Pope, an evil genius lawyer, smug Inquisitors who get off on sadism–those poor, screwed-over Templars never stood a chance. But it’s not just them. It’s the fast-talking Wall Street powerbrokers, the television evangelists, and the trailer trash rednecks that always vote Republican, even though it’s not in their own best interests. Why are
they
always looking to take advantage of
us?
–the honest, hard-working folks who just want to be decent and kind.

“Life on this planet is so fucked-up,” Gordon says, summarizing his thoughts.

“Amen to that, brother,” says Lloyd, fussing over Gordon’s empty glass. He pours another three fingers of absinthe and does his alchemy with the spoon and sugar again. “‘To live is to suffer,’ as the Buddhists are so fond of saying. It’s never been a picnic. In the Middle Ages we had warring religions, the Inquisition, and the Black Plague. In this century we’ve had warring nation-states, concentration camps, and now AIDS, the so-called ‘Gay Plague’–which will turn out to be a much bigger problem than most people realize.”

“I thought AIDS just killed homosexuals,” says Gordon, taking the proffered drink from Lloyd.

“As if that’s not bad enough!” Lloyd scowls. “But it’s going to cross over, mutate, just you watch…. Thanks to the maleficent powers-that-be, our brief era of the zipless fuck is already done for.”

“Wait a second… you’re saying AIDS was planned?
How?”

“It’s supposed to have got its start from some man fucking a monkey in deepest, darkest Africa. How’s that for a backhanded slap at Darwinism? But don’t you believe it. AIDS was intended, spread by vaccinations. The suffering of humanity is intended. There are others who
feed
off our suffering. They grow strong on it.”

“Lloyd, you’re freaking me out…” Gordon says, taking a big slurp of absinthe.

“Think of the Templars,” says Lloyd, “and their absolutely amazing capacity for self-slaughter. The Templar Rule forbade them to leave the battlefield unless they were outnumbered three-to-one–and they managed to live up to that. They paid with their lives accordingly. Then they stepped almost willingly into King Philip’s evil snare and submitted to years of torture and abuse that culminated in many of them being burned alive at the stake. But the Templars knew something… they weren’t just unwitting dupes. They had something on the Holy See–something which fomented their initial rocket-ride to wealth and power, and later, their equally precipitous fall.”

“So what are we talking about here? The Holy Grail? The Ark of the Covenant?” Gordon, like everyone else, has seen
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and he knows what Indiana Jones had to say about all that junk. But he’s pretty sure Lloyd won’t be giving him the Spielberg/Lucas-approved version of events.

“If you think it was something the Templars found during their excavations under the Temple Mount, you’d be right,” Lloyd says, “but it wasn’t what you might expect. There was no treasure. The original Temple built by King Solomon had been sacked and looted by the Sumerian King Nebuchadrezzar and his legions in the summer of 586 BC. After Herod the Great went to all the trouble of rebuilding it, the Temple was destroyed once again by Titus in 70 AD. All valuables were plundered in both instances, of course. So there was no Holy Grail left for the Templars to find, whether it be Christ’s Cup from the Last Supper or documents pertaining to the secret bloodline–
Le Serpent Rouge
–of the Merovingian kings who were supposed to have been descended from the union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. They
probably
didn’t find the embalmed head of John the Baptist there, either, although that used to be my favorite theory. It would go a long way toward explaining the mystery of Baphomet. You remember what happened to John after Salome did her little dance for her step-daddy Herod, don’t you?… The Mandaeans of Iraq believed John was the true messiah, rather than Jesus, as did the Johannites, who further believed that Christ or his disciples had assassinated John so they could take over his flock. That belief, by the way, was called the Great Heresy. Some say it was a belief that even Leonardo da Vinci secretly held. As for why the Templars referred to the head as Baphomet, I’ve read that it derives from the Greek words ’Baphe’ and ’Metis’. The two words combined translate as ‘Baptism of Wisdom’–which would fit.”

Gordon’s head is reeling. He’s not sure whether it’s from the absinthe or Lloyd’s manic recitation of legends and facts, but he’s definitely feeling a bit more confused than usual.
Mary Magdalene and Jesus had a baby? Who knew? Baphomet is the mummified head of John the Baptist? Cool!

“How can you be sure of anything when it happened over eight hundred years ago?” he asks Lloyd.

“How can I be sure? Because there are levels of initiation beyond the 33 degrees of Freemasonry’s Scottish Rite. Levels I didn’t even know existed until I was told I was going higher.” Lloyd gets a misty look in his beady eyes. “I was flown to Paris first-class and put up in a lavish hotel with a balcony overlooking the Ile-des-Javiaux. That’s the tiny island in the Seine where Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney were burned at the stake after they renounced their confessions, once and for all, at a public trial held on March 18th, 1314, following the dissolution of the Order. It’s been said that Molay uttered a curse as the flames consumed him, demanding that his persecutors join him in front of God’s tribunal before the year was over. Pope Clement died 33 days later. Near the same time, Guillaume de Nogaret, that wet rat of a lawyer, was found dead of poison with his tongue horribly stuck out. King Philip was killed in a gruesome hunting accident several months after that. So you could say that God–or the Devil–avenged the Templars on Jacques de Molay’s behalf. By the way, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but there’s a Masonic youth club known as The Order of Jacques de Molay. Jimmy has belonged to it ever since he was little.”

“I know,” Gordon says, recalling his ill-fated experience with the Tree House Order of Jacques de Molay. “Jimmy tried to get me to join when I was seven.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. He almost killed me in the process.”

“That’s odd…” Lloyd says, pursing his thin lips. “Human sacrifice isn’t ordinarily required until one reaches the uppermost levels.”

Human
what?
“What the…
fuck
are you talking about?” Gordon asks, spilling absinthe down the front of his chin.

“What I’m about to tell you can never leave this room,” Lloyd says, pushing back in his chair. The tin umbrella’s shadow completely engulfs him again. “If you tell anyone what I’m about to tell you–and I mean
anyone at all
–your life will be in danger. Now, are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Hell yeah…” Gordon says. With that kind of a build-up, how could he possibly refuse? Besides, he’s feeling no fear at the moment. He’s drunker than he’s ever been.

“What I learned during my further initiations at the Grande Loge de France, I’m not allowed to speak of,” Lloyd says. “But I
will
tell you what I learned at the Grande Orient de France regarding Templar history. And that will give you clues to all the rest.”

Get off your high horse, you pompous, blubbery fuck,
Gordon thinks almost out loud.
You’ve been stringing me along all night, you bastard.
I want answers. Now!

“When the original nine Templars were tunneling under the Temple Mount,” says Lloyd, in storyteller mode, “they came across an older tunnel–one that had been there for many hundreds, if not thousands of years. This tunnel led to miles of larger tunnels that went deeper and deeper underground. Some of those tunnels led to chambers full of human bones. In one such chamber, the Templars encountered a doorway sheathed by a curtain of writhing blue flame. The doorway overwhelmed them with an atavistic sense of dread. Beyond it seemed nothing but a slathering chthonic maw. Fearful though they were, Hugh de Payens held up his lantern and dared to pass through the fiery curtain. He was met on the other side by the inhabitants of a strange and opulent subterranean world–ancients who’d once ruled the cities and skies above. They could communicate with Hugh in his own language and they welcomed him as a brother. And that’s how the Templars first encountered the Anunnaki.”

“Oh God, that is…
such bullshit!
What are you, like, Jules Verne all of a sudden? H.P.-fucking-Lovecraft?” At some level, Gordon knows he’s attacking Lloyd with the sarcasm of someone who’s incredibly shit-faced, but he can’t stop himself. “Who’re the Anunnaki then? A bunch of space aliens? Morlocks? Bigfoot? I mean,
c’mon
….”

Inside the darkness created by the big red umbrella, Lloyd seems as imperturbable as a giant clam. “You’re reacting so vehemently because your programmed belief system is being challenged,” he says. “I call this extraterrestrial species the Anunnaki because that was the name given to them by the ancient Sumerians. It translates as ‘Those Who Came to Earth from Heaven.’ Sumer, in case you don’t know, occupied the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers about fifty-five hundred years ago in what is now known as southern Iraq. It was the site of the world’s first civilization, if you’re gullible enough to believe the standard history books. But do a little digging and I think you’ll find that the Anunnaki turn up in just about every culture’s creation myths. You can recognize them by their names and symbols, which usually appear as serpents or dragons. They’re known as the Nagas of India and Tibet, the Djedhi of Egypt, the Lung Wangs of China, and the Neifelheim of Scandinavia. In Mesoamerica, where we know them best, they were called Kulkukán–or Quetzalcoatl.”

“Plumed Serpent,” Gordon translates, calmer now. “So, basically, you’re saying the Anunnaki are a bunch of feathered lizard dudes.”

“Close. Actually, they’re more amphibious. They have a humanoid form, with a serpent’s facial features and moist, scaly, greenish-black skin. That’s why they choose to live underground–it’s much easier on the epidermis. Some of them have adapted to a life of almost total darkness. That sub-race has shrunken to the size of pygmies. Their pupils have grown large and their skin has turned pale and ashen. They’re known as the ‘Greys,’ the aliens who seem so intent on abducting people and tickling them with anal probes these days. The Anunnaki, who live much closer to the Earth’s surface, have kept their skin’s original dark pigmentation. It helps protects them from the sun. They’re the ones who learned how to shape-shift and commandeer human bodies. They also, long ago, mixed their DNA with human genes, producing alien-human hybrids with elongated craniums, protruding stomachs, and thin arms. You can see it in depictions of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and his daughters. In that regard, they were known as the Nefilim, the so-called ‘sons of God’ in
Genesis
who ‘went to the daughters of men and had children by them.’ The Bible tells us the offspring of those lewd interspecies couplings were ‘the heroes of old, men of renown.’”

A mental snapshot of D.H. in his raccoon fur jacket and purple pimp hat flits through Gordon’s mind as he says: “Lloyd, babes, you a muthafuckin’ wild man.”

“Thank you for that earthy compliment,” Lloyd replies from the shadows.
Jesus
, Gordon thinks,
he sounds just like Orson Welles
. “I want to make one thing clear before we move on. The Anunnaki have been here on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years–and they weren’t the only ones. There was another extraterrestrial species that first landed in the north, the so-called ‘Nordic’-types. They were more like us. They had long blonde hair, intense–almost electric–blue eyes, and pearly white skin. And they were very tall, like your father, well over six feet. The symbols most associated with them are wings–whether angel wings or dragon wings–and birds in general, most often the Phoenix. As you might guess from the Scandinavian term ‘Neifelheim,’ the Nordic aliens were also lumped in the category of Nefilim, which has variously been translated as ‘giants’ or ‘Those Who Were Cast Down.’ They were also ‘the Watchers’ from the apocryphal text called
The Book of Enoch.
As I’m sure you understand by now, the Bible is nothing but a hodgepodge of dubious translations and retellings of old histories and myths from diverse cultures. Specifically, the Old Testament relies heavily on the ancient recorded history of Sumer and Babylon (the names have changed but the stories remain the same), and the New Testament is a rehashing of the Sun God myths earlier personified by Mithras, Osiris, and Attis, among others.”