THE SPIRAL STRAND - CHAPTER THREE - Jim

CHAPTER THREE
Jim

Fizz, or more accurately Franklin Fitzgerald, like all persons in my life hadn't arrived there just by chance. Synchronicity was a force in which I placed much faith but I had no truck with chance - things/events were pre-ordained in my worldview but the paths we walked were exactly like the strands on a spiderweb. Let me explain briefly:
There's this big spiderweb see - like it represents all pathways of life and the strands extend all the way outward to infinity while they also emanate from a central point. The radiating strands represent every possible aspect of creation and these are held together by a single spiral strand that interconnects them all, commencing from the centre and spiralling outward in an ever-expanding arc forever...
So we decide to manifest in the reality that we know (the spiderweb) and we choose a pathway to the centre (a strand) and we commence our journey. One pathway may be called Science and science takes you to the centre sure but the other strands called Religion, Satanism, Biology, Fantasy, Insanity, whatever your choice, also lead to the centre. All paths lead to the centre but they just as well lead away from it. And as we move along our chosen pathway, we are constantly meeting up with the spiral strand that magically links all systems and choices. So while we may be walking the insanity path, we can always take a detour on the spiral strand to wherever we wish - sanity and reason for example. And the people we meet on the journey are either on the chosen pathway or the spiral strand and they are there to teach us something even if it is simply how much we can dislike someone.
That's Jim's life analogy and I have yet to discover another system or philosophy that makes more sense. Everything exists in the spiderweb and has validity as a choice or experience but nothing exists without the validation of everything else and everything is linked to everything else. If you see what I mean. In other words - no system or expression of life is better than another nor can it exist without all the other system/s. I call it the everything is everywhere all the time philosophy and it works for me. Time is expressed the same way. You can move through time in any direction and its only a matter of choice how you do it.
Most people eventually find a strand that works for them and they travel along it to the centre, deviating off onto the spiral from time to time but invariably returning to the familiar. More daring people start on one and travel the spiral to a different strand and travel that route for a while hopping between strands on the spiral link until they reach the centre.
And then there are people like Fizz who aren't on a main strand at all - they travel the spiral for the whole fucking journey touching every strand innumerable times on the way so they experience tiny snippets of everything for the briefest of moments. It could be called the schizophrenic strand but I like to think of it as the Fizz Phenomenon or FP. People on the FP have really short attention spans and don't do well at school. Mothers bombard them with Ritalin or have them home schooled or just consider them impossible to teach like Basenji dogs learning obedience training - yeah right!
But FP's are the most interesting people on the planet. Why should they engage in other people's single strand worldview when they are moving between everyone's reality all the time?
You see, my spiderweb philosophy explains everything. Despite this, I still get surprised by FP's when I encounter them. Fizz was no exception.
He simply walked up to me in a coffee shop and sat opposite me, engaging me with his curious blue eyes.
His elongated face was styled like a Philip Bond illustration – a disproportionately large head on a thin, tapering neck - straight out of 2000AD, limp strands of soft sandy coloured hair bobbing across his forehead as he moved. And Fizz always moved. Fizz never stayed still - ever. Even when he slept (as I was later to find out) he twisted and turned or moaned and twitched or spoke or just rolled around. Stillness was to Fizz as Kryptonite was to Clark Kent. Fizz needed life to flow through him like the ever-moving shark relied on the water through his gills. Fizz was in flux.
He reminded me of an avatar I'd seen portrayed once - an Ascended Master - one of those religious paintings from the Renaissance all soft and mystical like. Could have been the Count St Germaine, Sananda - any one of those hypnotic countenances.
And he was dressed as curiously as his manifest energy: shocking-pink long-sleeved grandpa vest beneath a wrinkled ash-grey smock forming the topping to threadbare 501's that boasted patches, the origins and multiplicity of which defied description but melded into the form of a pair of pants only Fizz could have created or found.
"You're not what you seem..." he said cryptically through the rising steam of a skinny cappuccino.
I feigned aloofness.
"You a psychology major?" I responded. We were in a University town. This loon was probably on some new designer narcotic. I was nerdy enough to be part of the trip.
"I'm forty two," he said as if that clarified everything. "I'm not what I seem either. But I live on the spiral..."
That got me. He saw the stiffening of my fingers around the mug and the involuntary wrinkling of eyebrows.
He smiled. "Gotcha."
"Who the fuck are you?" I asked. Nothing could have prepared me for what he'd just said. "Explain the spiral..."
"I see into people," he continued. "Like I see into you... Your worldview is quite refreshingly free from guilt and you see life like a..."  He paused.
"Like a what?" I prompted wondering why I was even talking to this strange dude. But his disarming peculiarity had hooked me - I was squirming on the hook.
He sipped the coffee, forming a smile through the foam on his upper lip.
"Like a spider's web," he said, scanning my face for the awe he knew would be there.
I hunched forward conspiratorially, as if unseen forces were eavesdropping on this bizarre encounter. Why would they be? Why was our autopilot instinct so defensive? Was there some cellular incipient memory prompting us to return to the lower chakras and simply survive first then ask questions later?
"How the fuck do you know that?" I hissed. I hadn't shared those thoughts with anyone. "Who are you?"
The remains of the cappuccino was quaffed and an absent pink cuff  mopped up the foam moustache.
"Frederick Franklin Fitzgerald at your service - Fizz. Fizz to my friends," he said with a pseudo serious look in his eyes, extending a foam-flecked paw expecting a reciprocal companionly shake.
"Okay, Fizz is your name, buddy but who are you?" I asked ignoring the horizontal hand.
"So damn suspicious, Jim. So defensive..."
"Wouldn't you be if the roles were reversed?" I said. He knew my name?
He stowed the hand below the table and rocked back on the bench. He began to move in a systematic rocking motion, backward and forward reminding me of a friend’s autistic child who frequently and inexplicably disappeared in the same way, sometimes banging his head against the wardrobe door over and over again in about the same cadence as my visitor’s movements.
I shivered.
Fizz’s eyes had glazed over at the outset of this activity, far away – absent.
Just as suddenly, he returned from this momentary hiatus to say, "Hell, I don't rightly know about that," Pause. "Y'see I'm in as much of a quandary as you. But for different reasons."
"How do you know my life philosophy - um - Fizz?" I pressed, skirting the crypticism with which he chose to respond.
"Let's just say I have inner vision. It's my gift or curse - just like yours is thievery..."
I gulped on my own coffee almost choking as I swallowed.
"Can we get out of here?" I said, rising from my chair. "We need to take this away from here..."
We did. We left the coffee shop and hit the mall where the cacophonic hubbub offered my jangling nerves a measure of anonymous security.
I steered him to the fountain in Mandela Square. The disproportionate statue of Madiba towered over us, static and much more devoid of animation than I'm sure the sculptor intended. It was a fucking horrible piece and had I been Mandela, I'd have had the prick redo it until it looked like me, exhibited some form of sensitivity and was at least in proportion. Curiously perhaps the old man had liked it. Every time I set foot in the square I took a spare moment to hate it.
I wasn't sure what I was feeling toward my recently established acquaintance, however.
"Talk to me about the spiral," I hissed at him over the noise of the dancing fountain. "What do you mean by that? And where do you get off calling me a thief?"
Fizz was still smiling but given the colour that had begun to creep into my face accompanied by a scowl descending my mouth into a portcullis, he pulled his own lips straight and began to talk.
"I told you - I see into people... and things...bit of a curse really but has some merits of course..."
My eyebrows descended into deeper vees as I augmented the already established scowl.
"Okay already," he tutted. "I hang out at the Mocca Jive quite a bit and your aura kinda intrigued me. I try not to invade people's space but you have a very curious vibe about you so I kinda found myself probing. It just kinda happens sometimes...
"And I saw that you were - well - not what you made out to be - let me say nearly all of us aren't - but you were pretending on purpose. You were leading a real double life and that intrigued me..."
I'd lost the scowl by now and was mesmerised by his soft drawl.
"Go on," I urged.
"I locked onto your thoughts once or twice at the coffee shop and then got really excited..."
"Excited?"
"Yeah for sure. I saw you picturing the whole spider's web thing in your mind - y'know your worldview. And that just blew me away because it made so much sense of how I am and why I experience what I do."
I didn't know whether to feel violated by his psychic voyeurism or flattered at the complimentary way in which he perceived my life philosophy. I guess I was experiencing a little of both.
"Explain," I said.
"Well, Jim, I travel the spiral strand and never really spend any kind of time on the main ones. It just kinda made sense to me y'know. But more than that - it just feels right."
I didn't know what to say. It was all too strange.
"And besides," he said, "I can help you."
"Help me?" I sneered. "I don't need your help. Help to do what?"
He was smiling again.
"Help you to get rid of all that valuable inconvenient stuff you dunno what to do with."
"What - I - um - how?"
"How many times do I have to tell you - I see into people. I can find the right person to fence it off. Just got to get the right vibes and bingo we're home free..."
It was insane, I know, but he'd just proven to me that he could do what he said. And the "we" he'd elected to use clearly indicated that there was a budding symbiosis in the offing.
"Exactly," he said. "Symbiosis. I can do what you cannot and vice-versa so why shouldn't we both gain from it?"
And that was my first encounter with Fizz.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - CHAPTER TWO - Jim

CHAPTER TWO
Jim

The Gallbladder incident was the seminal moment in a life of mediocrity, transforming me from non-achiever to untouchable in a heartbeat. From that point onward I would never be accused. I would hone my skills, whatever shape they took, and ensure that I was above and beyond reproof.
I had no idea then, of course, that this pathway would meander through the garden of illegal temptation and follow the banks of the River Theft in the dictatorial kingdom of Capitalist Excess.
Yet through this opulent terrain it led me. And being somewhat opportunistic and daring of spirit, I learned how to lightly lift things that didn't belong to me, adeptly acquire goods, professionally purloin and pilfer pickings of a personal persuasion previously possessed by privileged people. And more than asinine alliteration I found myself curiously inspired by my actions - a dog that had just mastered a new trick and had to do it repeatedly rather than simply wag a glaringly obvious tail.
That was how my life of crime began but the route it followed was filled with glamour and excitement, the like of which far surpassed the rush I'd gleaned from any drugs sampled through my anarchic adolescence. And there had been a few.
But the best cocaine, albeit hyper-inspirational at times, fell way short of the heart-thumping waves of anticipation I'd experienced time and again as I stole furtively through a manicured garden on a moonless night clad in matte black and packing the tools of my trade. This sensation only grew as I scaled a drainpipe to a first floor balcony and silently alighted on synthetic soles that failed to raise even the slightest of squeaks on the highly polished flagstone finish. It had taken months of searching before I found shoes with grip and no groan. To this day this remains a trade secret as I'm sure the designer hadn't aimed his application toward activities quite so nefarious.
Then the thrill of gaining entry to "secure" buildings and bypassing sophisticated intrusion systems thanks to intelligence, research and after time - experience gained in-situ - remains my all time high. Aside perhaps from startling sex experienced from time to time with certain select partners who shared my passion for things - shall we say - different. But burglary of this style was an orgasm you could have on your own without touching yourself and it ran on and on. Put you in the zone.

The fruits of my labours had returned wealth far beyond that of my peers, colleagues and friends. As far as the world at large was concerned, Jim Juno was a broker of sorts who freelanced in stockmarket enterprises using other people's money to grow wealth while extracting generous commissions for his efforts. I mean, let's be honest, that sounds totally plausible doesn't it? And it is. But I didn't. I couldn't. Not that I didn't know how. I just didn't want to...
It did, however, involve countless hours of research and I even put myself through a financial futures course at a local college so I could display a diploma on my office wall pronouncing my meritorious graduation achievement from this little known school of commerce. I could talk the game you see. I followed the markets and to be honest (and I am - I steal, I don't lie) I even dabbled in the world of speculative investment returning fairly admirable results for an amateur. I followed the stock market so I could advise or counsel mates who were always on the cadge for free tips, intelligence they would usually have to buy from genuine stockbrokers with far less integrity than a self-confessed thief such as myself.
The cover worked and I could believably work from home armed with little more than a laptop, a few well labelled files and a mobile link to the Internet. No-one asked about my clients. They were private individuals and their personal investment information was sacrosanct. Even my most probing of friends realised this and grudgingly respected my wealth as it grew over the years, never suspecting for a moment that I was robbing the elite blind as voraciously as a piranha with an eating disorder.
By the time I was twenty three I had amassed a considerable amount of money and resellable trinkets, many of which weren't even reported missing as they themselves had clearly been obtained through questionable means.
This lifestyle forced me to study art and keep abreast of high societal foibles - what was in vogue, who was buying what, whose names appeared on the boards of which companies and where their personal passions lay. I got into the heads of my victims and even befriended a few. I could quite easily break bread one day with a corporate executive with fingers in many pies while on another day I would be discreetly removing a priceless Gauguin from the frame in his drawing room. It was business not personal and I never robbed anyone who couldn't afford the money or whose portfolio was on shaky ground.
The insights I gained into the murky world of blue chip commerce and ersatz sophistication was invaluable and I could easily flit between the worlds I had created - the high flying yuppies and the childhood friendships - like flicking a switch.
The biggest problem I had ever faced was establishing a reliable network for passing off the stolen goods. Money was kept (obviously), bonds traded, certain goods hoiked on e-bay and other more obscure Internet outlets. But artwork, coins, collectables and jewelry were another problem altogether.
Until I met Fizz.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - PART ONE - A LIFE OF CRIME

PART ONE
A LIFE OF CRIME

CHAPTER ONE

Jim

It all started at school when I'd been told I couldn't attend the rock music concert. That sucked.

It was the only time that the musos got a chance to play stuff other than classical pieces, which while being - well - classic, bored the shit out of the average teenage boy who'd just discovered Hendrix and Zappa. No offence to Wolfgang and Ludwig and the various Johan Sebastians who'd penned many a fine tune - even Jimi and Frank would admit to that - but I used to think they'd have taken a different direction if they'd had access to a Stratocaster with a whammy bar rather than tinkling on harpsichords in musty drawing rooms hung with heavily draped brocade in burgundy paisley. But hey, who was I?

Fact was, I'd been framed. Just like one of those pasty-faced tarts in the paintings in said musty drawing rooms; bemused ladies with more petticoats than virtue, witnessing, with the same dispassionate expression, each musical recital or the music teacher rogering the eager pupil on the velvetine piano stool. If Leonardo had only done a full length portrait of El Giaconda I reckon he'd have been dubbed one of the earliest pornographers. You might think that's just down to my own twisted mind but I swear the Mona Lisa wore the same expression as my ex-girlfriend Mary Manson when I was diddling her pink bits with my snakelike tongue. Still, we'll never know unless they miraculously turn up his secret sketch book - the one he used to practice proportion and human anatomy - nudge, nudge, wink, wink...

Speculation aside, I was in the frame, snookered and fitted up.

Someone had been smoking in the boys' room and no one was owning up to the deed. No one was being freed up from class either for the first and spectacular high school rock concert starring our own budding virtuosos. And it would have remained a deadlock if old Gallbladder Gilbert, our Maths teacher hadn't received the crumpled note from an anonymous snitch. 

He unfurled it with relish and as the ferrety eyes scanned the words before him, I could feel the perspiration trickling into my arse crack like an icy eel of guilt. Which is weird because I hadn't done anything to merit the discomfort. But there's something that tells you you're fucked even before the accuser makes eye contact with you or hisses your name which is precisely what Gallbladder did as the gnarled fist dropped to his thigh, telltale flashes of feint-ruled exercise paper pushing between the folds of flesh.

I heard my name spoken but I didn't register the implications of the sound as if someone was asking me for directions in a foreign language. It was only when it was repeated with the balance of the sentence - a command - that my synapses fired all at once like an anti-aircraft salvo on an average day in the Middle East.

"Jim Juno, come to the front of the class and bring your rucksack with you!"

"Sir?" I croaked. "Me, sir?"

It was pathetic but what could I do?  

What was more demoralising? Being framed as a filthy smoker? Or having homo Pirelly filters planted in my rucksack?

Either way and both ways it looked bad and I had a good idea who'd done the deed.

Elizabeth Miller, troll bitch from hell's shithouse!

My discomfort was amplified by the weird dynamic experienced by most people when the Damoclean finger of guilt veers away from their own little personal bubble and condemns some other poor sap thereby creating a knee-jerk judgement in the exonerated whether the patsy is guilty or not. Analysis and logical thinking is eclipsed by relief. Absurdity takes over. "Glad it's him not me" kicks in. "He always looked a bit dodgy anyway...." is the thought pattern created in the regional collective unconscious of teflon, omnipotent peers.

All this energy exacerbates the situation and seeps into the demeanour of the accuser at some subtle subliminal level.

The pack of Pirelly being crushed by Gallbladder's knuckly digits was akin to digging a condom out of my arse in front of a lynch mob of homophobic psychopaths. 

"Those aren't mine!" I said weakly. It was true but singularly unconvincing. 

Gallbladder beetled his hairy caterpillar brows at me.

"This is, however, your school bag." It wasn't a question so much as the sword that severs the last sinew holding up the exhausted bull's head. Unlike the bull though - I had never been in a position to gore the embroidered performer in the pantaloons. I'd had the butcher's cutting schematic tattooed on my hide even before the matador had entered the bullring.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes was it, Juno?" the nauseating little fart mocked.

"Yes sir," I said. "It's my bag but..."

He raised a knobbled claw to silence me while pantomiming his speech to the class.

"Let me guess - someone planted the evidence then tipped me off to your crime... How am I doing, Juno?"

When it's presented in such a ridiculous parody of reality then you're on a hiding to nothing. People want to believe the bullshit. People love entertainment especially when it's at someone else's expense.

"I guess," I sighed. "I don't smoke those..."

I faltered as his eyes lit up like a slot machine hitting jackpot.

"So you admit you smoke - just not those?"

The slimy fuck was enjoying this and judging by the partially suppressed tittering, so was the audience.

Fuck it, I thought, I might as well get it over with.

"Yes sir," I said, "I smoke forty or fifty a day when I've got no doob or smack or can't get my hands on a half-jack of brandy. It's just that my home life as a sex-toy for sexually repressed homosexual maths teachers is so stressful that I have to do something to relax me. Is my latest Hustler magazine still in my bag too?"

I don't know why I did it but it was worth the single moment of awe that enveloped the classroom. The swing from miscreant to martyr was instantaneous from the peer perspective. The effect my little outburst was having on Gallbladder was even more gratifying. His complexion was shifting through a spectrum of colours that would have done tribute to a gay convention's paint swatch booklet. The chameleon impression was accompanied by bulging eyes, engorged neck veins, perspiration beads on a rumpled expanse of forehead and a deep rumbling from within his carcass, a sound not unlike a drain gurgling as it struggles to flush excessive effluent. It was truly beautiful.

THE SPIRAL STRAND - PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE
Jim

I've been told I'm not a nice guy. That's probably true. The fact that I don't care would seem to reinforce the evaluation.
It's not that I go out of my way to hurt people - not in the physical sense anyway - but I steal from them so that does kinda hurt I guess. But where's the harm when the victims can afford it and the stuff is just sitting there looking pretty?
My mom always used to say people would find ways to justify anything they did and the more they did it, the more they would justify it. I'd love to say that was a load of bollocks because my mom was delusional but fact is - I can't because it's true.
From politics to religion to wife-bashing, the perpetrators all have arguments to support their case. Mostly anyway.
Me, I'm no different. Instead of languishing in squalor, living off state handouts and drinking myself into oblivion every day, I feed off the private sector like a ramora on the underbelly of a lazy shark.
Maybe you think that's a bad analogy. I mean there's supposed to be a symbiosis in those kinds of relationships but if you offer me some latitude here, I do provide a service. While I might not be freeing the mink and manure sharks of parasites, I am liberating them in another sense - and I don't just mean by purloining unnecessary assets - I am unburdening them from onerous attachment.
Yeah, I know. Sounds like bullshit and probably is but when you see how these sparkling-eyed socialites get hooked on material trinkets, it really shifts their focus from the more profound aspects of existence such as their emotional and spiritual needs. They're so wrapped up in the outer image that their inner selves are starving. It's a nauseating circus of nips, tucks, sports cars, lavish houses, designer labels, over-refined foods that are cooked by underpaid servants and expansive, unvisited gardens that could provide accommodation to thousands of underprivileged souls across the country.
And it's not just sour grapes either. They've got it so I wanna take it away. No. The backlash from disgruntled men who've cultivated a hatred for all things opulent and blame it on the previous regime, has resulted in mindless rape and murder whereas I rob the rich and it takes them until the next time they check the safe before they find out. I don't need to unload y'see. Even though the old man, I’m told – he left before I even knew him – wallowed in a morass of loathing and self-pity for most of his life, my mom still managed to give me a solid upbringing with a balanced set of values. Values, that is, that conform to a middle class, middle of the road, don't challenge the system kind of mindset.
I watched and I learned and ultimately I chose.
Not a career in medicine, nor in law (not in the conventional sense that is), nor in construction or in engineering (although I was adept in many of those areas) - I chose a career in property: other people's. And I acquired it through unlawful albeit creative, innovative methodology.
I was a thief. A damn good one. Or had been until now.
Let me tell you how I got here.
Where?
Standing over a corpse in a darkened bedroom - someone else's bedroom - with all escape routes cut off.
 Fuck!

THE SPIRAL STRAND - PREFACE

The Spiral Strand
PREFACE

In many ancient mythologies, an assertion of cosmic synchronicity is averred – akin to the butterfly effect, (the Zen interconnectedness of all things) this posits that no thing is happenstance – it is the result of a ripple effect whether physically discernible or not, oftentimes not. So many interlaced aspects of reality are interfacing across an infinite number of layers and our infinitesimally minute perception in this third dimensional plane is the poorest viewpoint into the myriad influences beyond our ken or understanding.
For example, something, somewhere, somehow clicked a series of cosmic links into place that became manifest in what we would come to call the year 1947. In one instance, a portal opened up in the skies over Roswell, New Mexico, something entered this dimension from beyond this realm, and in concert with this event, a number of earthenware jars about two feet tall containing numerous biblical scrolls, were stumbled upon within a cave in Qumran by Mohammed adh-Dhib, a young Bedouin shepherd. The former event stoked the fires of incredulity, science fiction speculation, a bizarre, unlikely(?) tale of an extraterrestrial craft crashing in the New Mexico desert, at first openly admitted by the military as being proof positive of alien humanoids and technology among us, then vehemently denied, the official version turning to the mundane explanation of a failed weather balloon.
The latter event, however, despite years of obfuscation and academic spin, was a much harder phenomenon to debunk – the scrolls were real, their portent enormous for the diehard conventional Christian, their authenticity, therefore called into question and their decipherment and public disclosure, stalled for many years.
That the events may be linked – we have neither the means nor the time to explore that possibility, suffice to say, the effects of both would be seminal and, are germane to this very tale.
Secreted within the ceramic pots, a pair of apparently innocuous parchments came to light, at first glance entirely unremarkable until one digests the contents of said parchments, which, originally from one of the famous caves of Qumran, had found their way to a humble dwelling in the Old City in Jerusalem, located over the temple precinct from early Christian times.
These parchments, written in Aramaic were addressed to the Sanhedrin, the Jewish High Court of the day. They were signed by a man calling himself bani meshiha, the Messiah of the Children of Israel, and the content of the letters outlined his defence of the charge laid against him by the Sanhedrin for daring to call himself “son of God.”
This revelation, in and of itself, belies no startling significance for, even if Jesus had been the author of these papers, it would seem apposite that someone accused of such a charge would logically commit a defence to writing – it stands to reason. What is, however, most significant indeed, is the dating of these parchments to AD45, which would suggest that the defendant was alive and well at this time when contrarily, in the gospels, he was reported to have been executed some ten years or so prior. Even more significant again – the claims made in the author’s defence of the charge which in Letter 1 is explained that what he meant was not that he was “God” but rather the spirit of God was within him – not that he was physically the son of God - that he was a spiritually adopted son of God as was everyone else who felt similarly filled with the “spirit” – they too were “sons of God.” In other words, the author, Jesus, by all accounts, is disavowing any claim to divinity or at best, claiming no greater divinity than anyone else carrying the spirit of God within them. Pretty damning stuff for a religion founded and maintained on the very premise of this man’s divinity, something, he claimed, in his legal defence, he did not actually exclusively or uniquely possess.
In short, the very foundations of Christianity would crumble were such an assertion true, the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.
Yet this is only part of the story.
Look back to the so-called 18th dynasty of Ancient Egypt and the pharaoh, Akhenaten’s chief consort, his wife, Nefertiti – some theorise that Akhenaten is synonymous with Moses, unarguably an Egyptian of some noble calling, however, little is ever said of the women “behind” the men.
For millennia, the priest kings have held sway and written the book on our history, created humankind’s narrative, however, the consorts, the wives, the queens – the partners, may provide significant clues to mysteries that defy explanation to this day. The Sumerian goddess, Ninhursag, the heretical Egyptian consort, Nefertiti, the scandalised whore, Mary Magdalene – these are the principal players in humankind’s story – all have been overlooked. Then there is the paradox that is the mystery of Rennes Le Chateau and a simple parish priest’s sudden and inexplicable wealth – everyone has delved into the life and doings of the priest himself, Bérenger Saunière and once again, his devoted “housekeeper” and confidante, Marie Dénarnaud assumes a minor role in the drama. That, I believe, is a grave mistake for they are all connected. In ways that will become clear as our tale unfolds…