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Page 46.
Scene 21. Dr. Night: Underworld Triumph
 There was quiet jubilation in the Black Umbrella (BLUM) space control center under Kisimul Castle in Castle Bay on the southernmost of the Outer Hebrides—Barra, a rugged island in the North Atlantic within the coastal boundaries of Scotland.
Dispassionately, a launch control announcer said: "Acquisition is now complete."
The sixty technicians in the shining space center clapped politely. Dressed in surgical scrubs of varying colors, they were bathed in the curiously peaceful greenish waters of the kelpy bay. As wind outside the heavy plate glass windows moved water, foam, and seaweed about, flashes of yellowish sunlight cast hypnotically calming patterns around the walls and people of the underground nerve center.
"You see," Dr. Night's dry, calm voice said, "we have achieved our objective through calm, focused discipline and attention to detail. I congratulate each of you, and will award each man and woman a significant bonus in their pay."
There was ripple of pleased laughter, punctuated with enthusiastic clapping.
"The former Project David of Anaconda is now Project Gemini of the Black Umbrella Consortium."
More clapping.
"This is only the beginning, ladies and gentlemen. Now begins the hard part. The bird is now safely in our hands, and orbiting over the Tropic of Cancer. We will refer to our wonderful and exciting new cause as Project Gemini—after the divine twins who saved the Roman Republic in a great battle just a few years after its founding in 509 BCE."
He added: "Keep your eyes and ears open to ensure absolute secrecy that has made our organization so successful. We have grown to a global power under the noses of our opposition. We are too big to fail, too powerful to crush, and too successful to be acquired or destroyed by the corponations that rule the world. They are obsolete, and we are the New World Order."
As the techs and engineers clapped each other on the back, he added:
"Remember, we are not like our enemies. We are of the night. We are the earth, the underworld. We are dark and stealthy. Our power lies in silence, while they peddle all their blather to billions of gullible victims using the media they control. They are about talk—we are about action. We walk silently and conquer in darkness. Even the light of our victory is a black one. For every day, there must be a night. We are Persephone—the Korē, the virginal daughter of the grain goddess Demeter. Like the Neolithic grain itself, Korē the pure maiden was abducted from a meadow where she played with the feral child Artemis and other virginal huntresses and she-warriors. Hades, the king of night, abducted her to be his wife, which made her debased and defiled. Korē in her other life, this dark life, became the fearsome queen of the underworld. Her name as queen of the underworld was Persephone—she whose name must never be spoken, so dreadful was she. With the help of the sun and other daylight gods, Demeter found her beloved daughter. Zeus decreed that for half the year, Korē the maiden would run and play with her sisters on the sunny wheat fields when they are ready for harvest. Then, as the grain falls to the earth, dies, and lies entombed until its resurrection in the next crop cycle, Korē once again becomes the most dreadful female in the cosmos, the queen of the underworld, Persephone—whose terrifying name must never be spoken, as if the very sound of it could kill the speaker or the hearer of it. She is our model and guide as we seize the world, along with the Furies Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone who serve her."
He added with relish: “Alecto, relentless fury, an anger without reason or bounds, rage that exists purely for the sake of rage, chaos, and destruction, death to humans. And her sister Furies: “Tisiphone, limitless Revenge; and Megaera, boundless Jealousy.”
In the underwater (and underground) nerve center, the late afternoon sunlight played in chaotic but pleasing patterns all around the walls and over the faces of those in the domed chamber. They did not laugh or clap, but regarded each other with a mix of fear and awe. The power of Dr. Night, and the forces he mustered, seemed beyond all natural boundaries. The irrational ruler of the ancient physical world was back in the saddle: Fear, and only Fear itself.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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