Robert Browne - The Paradise Prophecy

A wandering soul. The Telum.

The word itself was Latin for weapon- which was why he had asked Philip about it-but how could a person be a weapon?

And what about the key the guardians were protecting? Was its secret somehow hidden in this manuscript he had tucked under his arm?

Was that why Gabriela and Ozan had worked so hard to decipher it?

Why Belial had wanted it?

“She’s really giving me the evil eye,” Callahan said. “Should I be worried?”

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Batty looked off to their left where an old tribal woman with gold neck rings was watching them work their way down the trail.

“I doubt Belial would be able to find a new skin quite that fast. Besides, she’d do a lot more than stare.”

“You can understand why I’m a little jumpy,” Callahan said. “And I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.”

“Relax. She’s a Kayan villager. She doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, if you asked, she’d probably take you into her home and feed you.”

“Just as long as she doesn’t try feed on me,” Callahan said. “I’ve had enough excitement for one day. And what’s with the neck rings?”

Batty threw her a glance, surprised that in all of her travels, Callahan hadn’t encountered such a sight before.

“The Kayan consider an elongated neck a sign of beauty,” he told her. “The rings force the collarbone and ribs to compress and make the neck look longer than it really is.”

“You truly are a font of information, aren’t you? My own personal Internet.” She looked at the Kayan woman again. “How can they do that to themselves?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you wearing five-inch heels when we went to that auction?”

Callahan conceded the point with a shrug. “Speaking of which, my feet are killing me. Along with every other part of my body. Let me check to see if I’ve got a signal now. Maybe we can get somebody to pick us up.”

She stopped and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket, checking the screen and not happy with what she saw.

“Shit. You’d think if the missionaries can build a temple up here, someone could erect a cell tower.”

Batty shook his head. “I sometimes wonder how the world survived before those things were invented.”

“Why don’t we ask the lady with the stretched neck?”

They were moving through a forest of pines when Batty thought about Milton and the seven missing pages from the Devil’s Bible.

It was a foregone conclusion now that Milton was a guardian himself-an idea that might seem far-fetched to some, but to Batty’s mind, only made sense. Milton was a deeply religious man and a passionate civil servant who often spoke out against the king. He had almost gotten himself killed for it, and had spent much of the latter days of his life in sightless seclusion, his reputation tarnished. And it wouldn’t be outside his nature to take on the responsibilities of Custodes Sacri , especially if it meant he’d spend those last days in the service of God.

But Brother Philip had said that the curse on those pages had driven Milton blind-just like Galileo before him. And that Milton had destroyed the pages when he realized how dangerous they were.

But could any of this be true?

Could both of these men have had possession of the pages at some point in their lives?

Philip had said that Galileo had given Milton “the bug,” and Batty knew that the poet had visited the astronomer on his travels through Europe. Had an obsession been born during that visit? An obsession that had eventually been satisfied, only to drive Milton blind?

And why had Ozan wanted to know about the pages? Were they somehow mixed in with his attempts to decipher those verses from Paradise Lost ? And did it all relate in some way to this mysterious Telum?

There was a connection here. There had to be.

But Batty had too little information to figure it all out.

So maybe he needed to start with Ozan’s and Gabriela’s obsession. In chapter eleven of Paradise Lost, the Archangel Michael takes Adam to the highest hill in Paradise and shows him a vision of the future. Adam witnesses the death and destruction of Noah’s flood, the rise of the tyrant Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, the deterioration caused by old age, the ravages of war and disease-all of which could be prevented if man were to live a virtuous life.

But there were no secret messages to be found in that chapter. No codes to be deciphered. Batty himself had been through the book time and again and had never found anything.

But then he suddenly remembered something. A small bit of curiosity he had set aside when things started getting crazy on the plane. Before Belial had hijacked Callahan and the plane started its nosedive, he had been looking through the manuscript, marveling at the ink on the pages, the words crossed out, the inserted revisions.

But as he had flipped to the end of the book, he had noticed something odd. Something wrong with the binding.

Something missing .

Could it be that simple?

Batty stopped in his tracks, fumbling for the book bag. As he reached inside and grabbed the manuscript, Callahan realized that he was no longer walking beside her and turned to look.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Batty found the stump of a fallen pine and sat, pulling the book into his lap. “I think I may have just figured it out.”

She came over to him. “Figured what out?”

He quickly flipped through the manuscript until he reached the last chapter-what would be chapters eleven and twelve in the revised version, but was actually chapter ten here. He checked the binding, saw the torn edges, as if several pages had been removed.

“Is it possible?”

“Is what possible? What’s going on?”

He looked up at Callahan. “Ozan and Gabriela were trying to decipher the wrong chapter eleven.”

“What do you mean the wrong chapter eleven? What other chapter eleven is there?

“ Paradise Lost was originally divided into ten chapters,” he told her. “Until the publisher asked Milton to split two of those chapters to make it seem longer and look more appealing to the readers.”

He showed her the manuscript. “This is the original ten chapters.” He gestured to the torn binding. “But there are pages missing here. Torn out of the back of the book. But if you look at the verse, it’s complete. It ends exactly where it’s supposed to end.”

A light came into Callahan’s eyes. “He wrote another chapter. The real chapter eleven.”

“The right chapter eleven,” Batty said. “The one they should have been trying to decipher all along. And look how many pages are missing.”

He handed her the book and she took a closer look at the binding, the torn edges, mentally counting them, moving her lips as she did. Then her eyes went wide.

“Seven,” she said.

“The seven missing pages of the Devil’s Bible. And this isn’t a coincidence. That has to be what was there.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. Philip said Milton burned them, and look at these edges. This is the same paper he used in the rest of the manuscript. And you said the Codex’s pages were huge, and written several centuries before.”

Batty thought about this and shook his head. “I don’t have an explanation, but I know I’m right. And this has something to do with the key Philip told us about. It’s a prophecy of some kind, an instruction manual-who knows?”

“But you’d think if anyone would, it would be Ozan and Gabriela.”

“No necessarily,” Batty said. “Like I told you before, they could be operating on blind faith. Remember that e-mail? And what Philip said about Ozan being a curious old fool?”