All of a sudden, the grip that the book had over her was loosened and she dropped it back on the table. She looked at the book, which was still open, at the page where she had stopped, and could not make out what the writings meant anymore.
Slowly, she backed away from the book. Her heart was beating very fast as thoughts swam around her head. She felt like she was hearing voices talking to her. She did not feel alone in the room anymore. The temperature of the room still remained chilly and sometimes she thought she saw movement and shadows dart around.
She climbed into the bed and moved to the furthermost part, drawing her legs up to her chest, and burying her face within them, closing her eyes as fear gripped her.
The voices kept coming, whispering incoherently, urging her to do something she could not understand nor know how to.
“Leave me alone.” She screamed.
Her voice sounded so small and didn't seem to have travelled past the door. The light in the room seemed to grow dim and shadows jumped at her from every corner. She tried screaming again, but there didn't seem to be any success with her screams.
She sat there huddled up and sobbed quietly as fear gripped her. She could not move from where she sat, even though every nerve in her body wanted her to jump off the bed and run out from the room.
After a while, the voices seemed to stop and the light brightened up again. The room returned to its normal temperature. Only then did she raise her head from her knees and she ventured to look up. The book still lay open at the page she had stopped. She looked around the room and everything felt normal again.
She slowly climbed down from the bed, padded gingerly over to the refrigerator, and grabbed a can of soda. She drank the soft drink noisily, then proceeded to wipe her wet eyes. She slowly walked over to the table and looked at the book again. She still could not understand it anymore. She walked back to the bed and sat down hard on it. She picked up the remote control and clicked on the television, but was not even seeing the re-run of 'Hustlers' showing on BBC, as her mind wandered away to reflect on what had happened some minutes ago.
Everything she had just read seemed to flood her mind as she tried to understand where she featured in the scheme of predicted unfolding events. If her heart was telling her the truth, which she believed it was, she was that chosen one with the ability to read the language of Heaven, and that made her a very valuable asset to whoever might want to upset the balance of creation. The prospect scared her as much as the realization of what she could do.
She was still worried and did not realize when sleep overcame her. She lay there; a half empty can of soda between her laps, with the television blaring when Jo returned some hours past midnight. She had not noticed the blue light that filled the room and the book closing itself, and Jo did not notice any change either in the room when she snuck in.
Jo took the can of soda from her friend’s laps and dropped it on the table beside the book. For a moment, her eyes lingered on the ominous looking old book and then turned to her friend who was fast asleep. She wished she could just get rid of the book. They had both tried to ignore it, but she knew her friend, as herself, was ever aware of the presence of the book.
She undressed and took a warm bath before returning to the room. Martha had moved in her sleep and Jo was glad she had taken away the can of soda, or else she would have spilled it on the bed. Jo picked up the remote control where Martha had discarded it and turned off the television. Then lowering the lights in the room, she climbed into the bed beside her friend, hoping she would not wake up with a hangover after the large quantity of alcohol she had taken at the club.
Cathy McBride stepped out from the chauffer driven Rolls Royce Phantom that brought her from her Manhattan residence to the Waldorf Astoria. The doorman, like her chauffer, was puzzled at the hint of a smile on her face as she walked towards the entrance of the hotel. She was a rather regular face at the hotel, as she held business meetings in her permanent suite at the hotel, and the doorman as all the others who rotated shifts had never seen her smile in all the years she had been coming there.
Cathy had enjoyed a long afternoon with Dan Fisher, her accountant, at her house, making love over and over again until she lost count. She had gone out with the small man, just to loosen up her presumed up-tightness a bit, and one drink had led to another, with one thing leading to another, and she had ended up with Dan in her home that night. Despite his small stature, he had not been a disappointment. She had compared his performance with those of her paid gigolos and still found it hard to rank the professionals in the sex business higher than the small town accountant she had picked up from the small accounting firm many years ago.
His wife, she presumed, must be cursing herself for leaving him when he had nothing. She not only lost one of the best men in bed, but a millionaire by all counts, and that was what she had moulded Dan into. She smiled at the thought as she stepped into the elevator and was borne up to the third floor where she had her suite.
The suite was one of the most expensively furnished in the hotel, as the manager had personally told her, with the floor covered with expensive handmade Persian rugs, and the suite itself fitted with all the most expensive and top of the line facilities to make life at the hotel as comfortable as her own home. A former American president, she couldn't remember the one, had always used the room the manager had told her and an Arabian prince, who she could also not remember, had fancied the suite over all the others in the hotel.
Cathy didn't really care who had used the room or who loved it, as long as it met her stringent requirements, among which was absolute privacy. The hotel had permitted her personal security company to conduct regular sweeps of the suite, especially whenever she was billed to use it, for hidden listening devices, which her competitors; most of whom could go to great lengths to know what she was doing, could have planted in the room.
She also got permission to make some alterations to the suite, providing facilities for a small conference in the room equipped with state of the art equipment, which could connect her with whoever or whatever she wanted around the world.
She smiled as she thought about that. The hotel management couldn't turn her offers down. She was one of their most valuable customers, whose financial standing was gradually equalled that of Buffet and Gates as she had left Oprah behind long ago, and whose patronage brought more big business their way.
She produced the key card from her purse and inserted it into the card slot beside the door. The key card and the slot had also been part of the modifications she had made and the hotel management had accepted, letting her bring in her own specialists to have it designed and installed. The card could not be copied and any attempt to tamper with the slot triggered an alarm that would bring hotel security to the door, as well as backing up the information in the computers in the suite to an external server in split seconds, destroying the equipment once the data on them had been successfully backed up.
She had carried out countless business deals and negotiations in the comfort of the suite, and the facilities in the suite, in a big way, helped her manipulate those she did business with, making them more receptive to her point of view in any negotiation.
The green light flashed and a small touchpad was revealed on which she placed her hand and, after the green light had scanned her hand to confirm her identity, the door opened with several clicks. Only a few people had access to the room and the scanner had their palm and finger prints in its database to analyse before granting them entrance to the suite.
Cathy pushed the door open and strode into the suite. She also used the place for other purposes, which were far removed from the usual business deals and negotiations, and was another reason why she insisted on absolute privacy.
Apart from its uses for business meetings and negotiations, the suite also was a meeting point for the council members of the Blood Brotherhood. The brotherhood had its temple far away in a secure compound in China, which was camouflaged as a textile factory, but which in fact housed the massive underground temple built hundreds of years ago for some native Chinese deity, now acquired by the brotherhood to worship the King of Darkness. The suite at the Waldorf, however, was used by the council members to relay information or make decisions that could affect all the other members and did not require the presence of every member of the sacred brotherhood as the visits to the temple required. Cathy relayed messages from the beyond to the other council members from the suite, who in turn, passed on the message to the other members if the message concerned them.
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