Candlemoth by R. J. Ellory Page A

Schembri had a
way of making it clear what you should listen to and what you shouldn't.
        What
he did tell me took place over three days. We only ever met at meals, and after
the first day I remember standing there in the line, craning my neck, looking
at face after face after face, searching him out amidst the confusion of
people. My trial and the subsequent months of legal and judicial wrangling were
drawn out and complex. But that was another story, another story altogether.
Until the case was concluded and the death sentence levied I was there with the
rest of the innocents.
        I
found Robert Schembri in the corner of the hall, back and to the left.
Apparently he always sat alone. People avoided him like a disease, a
bio-hazard. Seems he'd sat alone for all the years he'd been there, and but for
the few hours I shared with him he would sit alone for the rest of his life.
        He
possessed a strange manner. The way he would look at me I felt invisible, but
that sensation did not disturb me, merely made me feel I was there to listen,
to be a receipt point for whatever came tumbling from his lips. Schembri
described himself as a channel from the gods. What that meant didn't matter.
        'Tell
ya something, kid,' he started. He said that each time he began. Tell ya
something.
        'It
was a premeditated act, all of it. The Killing of the King. It was necessary as
the second part of the trilogy. They had three goals to bring about the
complete decay of matter, the total dissolution of society.'
        Schembri
smiled sardonically.
        'Tell
me you don't see society falling to pieces, going all to hell in a handbasket.'
        'I
see it,' I replied.
        He
nodded. 'What happened to you is a symptom of the disease.'
        'A
symptom? A symptom of what?' I leaned forward.
        'All
the shit and shenanigans you got yourself into down here.' He smiled wryly and
winked. 'I know a little of this and a little of that, you see.'
        I
shook my head. 'You know about what happened to me?'
        Schembri
waved my question away. 'Got a question for you,' he said. 'You know why they
killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy?'
        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