Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation by A.W. Hill Page A

“You’ve
been to my house. Out back, there’s a statue of the Phrygian mother goddess,
Cybele, that I had shipped from a flea market in Paris. One of her palms is
open, like this, and Brigit—scamp that she is—saw fit to put a moon rock in
it.”
         “A moon
rock.”
         “Yeah,”
said Raszer. “They sold like hotcakes for a while. Supposedly fragments brought
back from the moon landing. Probably about as authentic as medieval saints’
relics, but from the way old Silas Endicott looked at it just before he keeled
over, you’d have thought it came from the seventh circle of hell.”
         She
clapped her hands together and stood up. “Let’s take a look,” she said, and
went to a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. She pulled out Jung’s Man And His Symbols , flipped through it,
and found nothing. In a lesser-known text, however, she found a cross-reference
under Cybele and read, “‘The baitylos , a black meteorite associated
with the cults of Cybele and Attis and purportedly found on the summit of Mt.
Ida in Pessinus.’” Hildegarde glanced up from the page. “Pessinus . . . that’s
in Turkey, isn’t it?”
         “Right.
That’s where Cybele’s cult peaked. Sometime around the seventh century bc ,
though she had a revival in Rome in the early Christian period. What else?”
         “That’s
about it—not much to go on, is it?” She licked a long-nailed finger and flipped
a page. “Hang on . . . here’s something. “By way of both its physical
appearance and etymological association with Cybele, also known as Kybele,
Kubaba, and Kube, the sacred stone is thought by some to be mythologically
related to the Black Stone in the Ka’ba of Mecca, object of Muslim pilgrimage,
and to the Thracian word for dice .”
         “That’s
a twisted trail, all right,” said Raszer. “ Kube .
Cube. Dice. Islam?
         “The
Ka’ba was a pagan shrine long before Mohammed consecrated it.”
         Raszer
squinted. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Well, any sort of paganism would’ve
given the old man tremors, but what are the odds he knew any of this?”
         “I guess
that’s for you to find out, Stephan,” she said. “Maybe the kids his daughter
fell in with were into some kind of ceremonial magic. Maybe the sister . . .
left something similar behind.” She replaced the book, then returned to her
seat. “The important question is what all this means for you. What you’re going
to make of it.”
         “I
dunno. I’m going up to Azusa to see the elders of the church—the JWs—this
afternoon. They work as a family. They may want me to pursue this, or they may
not.”
         “That’s
not quite what I meant, Stephan,” said Hildegarde.
         “I know
that’s not what you meant,” said Raszer. “I’m stalling.”
         “In
light of your present state, you may be tempted to see this thing as a chance
for personal redemption, dropping out of the blue as it did.”
         “The sky
hasn’t been blue for weeks,” said Raszer.
         “Don’t
play,” she said, crinkling her brow. “The thing is, not everyone who is lost
can be found, or wants to be. We do what we must, as best we can, and accept
that not all riddles yield to our wits—not all mysteries are fathomable.”
         Raszer
suddenly felt moved to break into song. “ Ya
do what you must, and ya do it well ,” he chanted nasally. “Now, there’s a
synchronicity.”
         “I don’t
understand,” said Hildegarde.
         “Buckets
of Rain,” he explained, nodding to the window. “It’s a Dylan tune.”
         “Ah,”
she said. “But you do know what I mean.”
         “Yes,
but human mysteries—I think—have
their roots in some kind of detour, some hidden variable that alters what
otherwise would have been a person’s route. If you can work your way back to
that detour, you can get to the bottom of things.”