Day 21 - Twelve Story

Twelve Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The Twelve had gathered.  It was not the first time they had gathered, no not by a long shot.  They had a long and secretive history of meetings where it can only be assumed they compared arcane knowledge and made decisions that would affect the progression of mankind.  They were not the original Twelve, but even the current Twelve didn’t know who was who or how many had come before.  Part of who they were was based in complete and total privacy.  Names were not used and the group lineage wasn’t spoken of.  Just how one member replaced another was also unknown.  Each of the Twelve chose their successor with no input, or no publicly admitted input, from any of the others.  The only way the other eleven knew was when a new twelfth arrived.  There was a strong possibility that assassinations and infiltrations had occurred through the years, but the group remained strong and their meetings still occurred with regularity, so any attempted coup seemingly failed in its purpose.  There was wealth and influence and power to be had, so it is always possible that any unintended new members simply enjoyed their position and had no other aspirations than that.

It was the turn of the century and there were an unprecedented number of new discoveries occurring.  The Twelve liked to keep track of these sorts of things.  Electricity was the new magic and new magic was something of interest.

In 1908 two things had happened.  One in Russia that was well documented and many have hypothesized about.  The other was in the Brazilian Rainforest which was kept more decidedly quiet.  The Twelve had no answer or concern for the Russian event.  It seemed vapid enough when considering the destructive nature and history of the planet and space itself.  In Brazil though, a strange and unquestionable monstrosity had been revealed.  It was possible that it had awoken, disrupted by the events in Russia.  Or it was possible that its arrival had created the Russian destruction.  Or it was possible that it was an unrelated atrocity altogether.  But something appeared.  At first it seemed like there was a plague, but it soon became apparent that it was much much worse.  Tunguska destroyed over 80 million trees and the blast covered an area of over 830 square miles.  Brazil was worse.   The earth was scorched.  Burnt to a crisp.  Life had evaporated.  Except for one anomaly.

It looked human.  In the center of the destruction there he was.  At first he seemed innocent.  It was considered a miracle that he had survived the destruction.  It was a mystery.

But then the diseases began.  Plagues like no one had ever seen before.  Men began to melt from the inside out.  Bodies turned to open wounds and erupted in pus and bile and acid. 

Those that survived were struck with overwhelming emotion and the craze began.

It was like a magnet had formed to draw the worst of all human thought and desire to this one place.  A beacon of evil.  Pandora’s Box shaped as a man.

The Electrician killed it. 

Electrical weaponry.  Electrical magic.

He had killed it, but not without great effort.

The body burnt.  The Twelve saw it burn and turn to ash.  It was assumed that he killed it.  But really, there was no way to determine what it was, where it came from and if it had simply gone back.  So they decided that they must have killed it.  No one knew what happened to its soul, if it had one.

The body had burnt.  They had all seen it.  But they also all saw what they did not want to acknowledge or admit.  The heart remained. 

The heart remained and the heart kept beating. 

It was attached to nothing – nothing living, nothing mechanical, nothing visible, and nothing detectable.  But it kept beating.

No satisfactory conclusion could be made, but the immediate threat had subsided.  Special attention would be paid to the heart.

As a point of interest it should be noted what occurred in Russia just a few years later.  In 1914 suspected occultist Rasputin turned out to be a very hard man to kill.  It is said he survived stabbings and poison and gun shots and beatings and very nearly survived icy cold water.  Officially history has decided this was all a quaint story.  And urban legend created by those that shot him, in order to make their deeds seem more heroic and epic and holy.  Everyone believes a good story.  But his heart, no one really knows what happened to his heart.  That little detail is covered up quite well.

In 1943 when Nikola Tesla finally passed away, the FBI confiscated much of his work.  Things were boxed up and shipped to be stored and studied and never spoke about publicly again.  No one thought it too strange that a supposed madman would have a beating heart attached to a machine.  No one knew what he was studying or why.  No one worried too much when they unhooked it.