ISBN: 158820989X
310 pages
©2001

CIRCLE OF FIRE
Chapter Preview...

Rain drizzled down. Beneath a tangled multi-canopy of primeval Mexican jungle, an ancient stone city lay hushed and hidden from the ages. Its chiseled ruins peeked cautiously out through dense vines. A wall carved with jaguars, serpents and parrots. Toltec warrior statues, strewn and fallen like captured pieces from a mammoth game of chess. The colonnades and broken bulwarks of a thousand year old temple. Lost to time and civilization in the vast Chiapas rain forest that spread to all horizons.

The air was saturated with mosquitoes.

A fifty foot pyramid slumbered beneath a millennium of mulch. Atop its flat summit lay dead men, dressed for safari. Dead pack mules lay bloated in the dank tropical heat at its base, all stiff and covered with flies.

A lone Mayan Indian guide staggered out through the flaps of a tent, one of a half dozen pitched in a neat row along what had been once the main piazza of a grand native city. Inside the tents, archaeological gear and Toltec artifacts lay tagged and numbered on tarps. And more dead men in safari wear reposed on canvas cots.

Last survivor of the expedition, delirious with yellow fever, the bronze-skinned Mayan slumped to the ground. His eyes focus and unfocused on the image of a snake hanging on a cross, sculpted eons ago into the base of the pyramid.

He muttered incoherently over and over, "Anticristo... anticristo... anticristo..."

* * * * *

A peculiar atmospheric phenomenon took place in the skies over Hector Falls on the morning Knox Wesley materialized there. On a cool, cloudless and dazzlingly sunbright Friday morning, there were dozens of reports of rolling thunder heard over the entire county, followed by an immense thunder clap and chain lightning -- all coming out of a perfectly clear, blue autumn sky.

Clem Mott observed the phenomenon while plowing under a field in his lower sixty acres. He shut down his tractor to better make out the source of the rumbling that emanated apparently from the open sky above him. But the sound seemed to come from every direction at once. And the display of lightning that followed was equally strange, not like any chain lightning Mott could ever recall having seen.

He went back to plowing, only to be startled half out of his wits by a tremendous thunder clap and a spike of lightning. He got off the tractor, holding his arthritic hip as he limp-ran to look down a slope where it hit. The air was alive with the bite of ozone and so ionized it sent a chill through him. He expected to see fire and charred ground where the blistering bolt had struck. But instead he found only silence and the brown wrecks of corn stalks weaving in a light breeze.

Mott squinted. A figure appeared far off in the field. A shaggy-headed man dressed all in black, walking briskly toward him between the rows. The sun-blanched slope grew unnaturally still and quiet.

"Might a weary traveler trouble you for some water?"

Mott studied the stranger's pale blue eyes as he approached. They hooked and held him almost hypnotically.

"No trouble at all, friend," Mott told him. He limped ahead of the man back to his tractor and poured him a cup of water from a jug. The stranger drank it down. Mott poured him another.

"Been walking long?"

The man smiled at him. "You might say that."

"Where you coming from?"

"From back there a ways," the man gestured. He laid a hand meaningfully on Mott's shoulder. "Lord bless you and all your house, brother."

Mott stepped back, suddenly clutched his arthritic hip and looked at the stranger in cold astonishment. "Who...who are you, mister?"

"Just an old missionary," the man said.

A half hour later, Mott came sprinting up to the porch of a farm house shaded by oaks. "Mattie!... Mattie!" he called, winded and wheezing for breath.

His wife rushed out, drying her hands on a dish towel. Her jaw dropped at the sight of Mott, prancing about like a happy child on his arthritic leg.

"Mattie, I've just met the most amazing man!"

* * * * *

In the course of the day, Knox Wesley visited a number of households and businesses in and around Hector Falls. He introduced himself as an itinerant missionary who was just passing through.

It was curious that Clem Mott and all those he spoke with were L.D.S. -- members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Mormon church. All attended the small Hector Falls Mormon church house that had been built by many of their fathers and grandfathers decades ago at the outskirts of town.

Wesley claimed to be a Mormon who had spent nearly his entire life in missionary work among the native Indians of Central and North America. He was in both his appearance and trade a walking anachronism. Somberly dressed, he looked as though he had just stepped forward through time. He might have fit better somewhere a century ago. He was spirited and overpoweringly charismatic, with all the fire and brimstone flair of an old time traveling Pentecostal revivalist. This was a sharp contrast to the modern Mormon Saints, whose demeanor was always subdued and reserved during chapel services.

He was moreover a self-professed life missionary of a religion that shunned the concept of career clergy entirely. A Mormon called to life-long missionary service was an unheard of thing. But when the Mormons of Hector Falls spoke with this Knox Wesley face to face, somehow they never doubted his claim. Something about him made them believe intensely that he had answered a unique call -- one that had come perhaps directly from the Father himself.

By sunset the phone lines were abuzz with faithful Saints exchanging gossip of their day's encounter with Knox Wesley. An autistic child Wesley had spoken to in one household was laughing for the first time in her life. Others proclaimed similar odd occurrences. The impression had been planted and now grew that Wesley was certainly an individual of great importance who may have come into their midst by celestial design and with supernal purpose. Truly, this man was a miracle worker, a messenger from God. This conviction seemed to leap into existence from somewhere deep within their souls, like a simple truth they had always instinctively known.

And so it came to pass that when Knox Wesley showed up the following afternoon for sacrament meeting at their little Mormon church, he was warmly welcomed by a small throng of awestruck Saints. The things he began to tell them, offhandedly at first and then with increasing vigor, struck still more profound awe in them than they could ever have imagined.

He stayed on in the community for several days. People saw him everywhere, strolling through town or countryside and missing hardly a single meeting of the second ward congregation at the Hector Falls Mormon church house.

Strangely, no one could say for certain where he was lodging.

* * * * *

A group of elders gathered with Bishop Vollfachs and his counselors in the bishop's office shortly after the sacrament meeting. Their solemn murmuring hushed instantly as Knox Wesley entered the room, closing the door behind him.

The lingering silence was broken finally by Bishop Vollfachs.

"Elder Wesley, there are some questions we would like to ask," he said, trying hard not to sound acquiescent.

Wesley's eyes flared a moment with a fervor that subsided almost as quickly as it came. His chill gaze roved from face to face, sizing up each in turn.

"An evil one stalks your congregation, brethren," he told them, low voiced. Not a single one of them took his gaze without looking almost instantly down or away.

Grandfather Rickenbaugh stepped forward. "Elder Wesley, concerns have been raised about these...revelations you claim are from God--"

Wesley spun on the frail old man, cutting off his speech.

"--It is written! In the latter days, demons shall take on flesh to walk the earth!" he hissed. "Yea, the very Sons of Perdition, seeking the plates, to destroy them, and deceiving the church with profound knowledge mingled in lies!"

They watched Wesley in sweaty silence.

"I don't recall that prophecy, Elder Wesley," Grandfather Rickenbaugh said simply. "Perhaps you could remind me of where it appears?"

"One apostate demon grows among you!" Wesley continued in deep baritone, blue eyes searing them one by one. "A young priest, well versed in scripture and deception."

"By whom were you ordained, Elder Wesley?" Bishop Vollfachs asked.

"Our Lord."

"Well, yes...but by whom? Specifically."

Wesley brought his head up, seeming to rise full extra inches in height. "By the hand of Jesus Christ himself," he told them.

More awful silence.

"And when did this ordination take place?" Bishop Vollfachs inquired carefully.

They watched awestruck as an aura of brilliance grew about Wesley until it surrounded his entire body. His face glowed like a saint's, so bright that it hurt their eyes and they put their hands up to shield them.

He looked like an angel!...

Wesley shook his head, as though the answer to Bishop Vollfachs' question should be obvious to them.

"Almost two thousand years ago," he said plainly.

* * * * *

What seemed a patch of the forest floor itself came suddenly to life and got up. A man, caked with dried mud, covered in leaves and moss. He wore the headdress of a shaman, his face and chest daubed with colored clays. Shaking a noisemaker, he uttered an incantation.

A young white man hand-held a 16mm Bolex movie camera. It whirred steadily, documenting the ritual. A microphone carried sounds to a tape recorder tended by Luis Montero. Luis was tall for a Mexican kid, almost six feet, stalwart and good looking with a heavy mustache.

Caleb Easton sat beside Luis, raptly jotting notes on a pad. His dark hair was thick as thatching and grown long, pushed casually back. A sparse beard clung to his face, emblazoned with the same hue-rich clays smudged along the foreheads and cheeks of all the Indian men there.

The shaman lifted a big kicking lizard and slid its pale belly down a long knife. The lizard bled and quit kicking. A crude bowl was passed through the hut, each of the men sipping its tinted, liquid contents. They handed it to Luis who drank and passed it to Caleb, who drank and made a face.

"Shit, Luis, what is this stuff?"

Luis shrugged indifferently. Caleb scooped pulpy nodules and spotted mushrooms from the bowl. "Oh, christ. Mescaline and mushrooms," he breathed.

Luis couldn't hear him.

"Peyote and psilocybin," Caleb said louder. "We're going to be sick as dogs."

Luis grinned at him. "You told me you wanted the whole experience, gringo boy."

The shaman moved, working his magic -- until he came face to face with Caleb. The holy man's dark eyes filled with fear. He froze and went silent. The chanting in the hut ceased. It took plenty to throw a fright into an old conjurer like that. He inched warily away from Caleb.

The participants came out of the crude hut and into the night. Caleb and Luis were among the last. The shaman reverently laid a small, hand-woven pouch with a drawstring in Caleb's hand. There was a symbol stained on it and something shapeless inside. He closed Caleb's fingers firmly around it. Caleb was not proficient enough in the language to understand the words the old holy man uttered.

"He says a powerful warrior's spirit lives inside you. But Uktena, the Snake Ghost, follows you," an Indian man translated for him. "The medicine bag is to protect you until you are a man," he nodded his painted face for emphasis. "Then, you must face him."

The shaman crouched at a distance. He seemed to be watching something beyond Caleb. Something moving.

Something no one else could see.