8/7
Played: May 8, 2023.
Saturday. October 13, 1973. Roger, Mitch, and Charley lurk outside the Jackson County Sheriff's Station, waiting for the caravan of sheriffs, deputies, UFO abductees, and press to make their way to the Pascagoula shipyard where Charlie Hickson and Calvin Parker will be hypnotized by Alan Hynek and show the authorities where their abduction event took place.
As they pass by Mitch eyeballs Charlie and Calvin, and sees History-B energy staining their auras, but that they aren't corrupted or ridden by memetic demons. Charlie is less freaked out than Calvin, but their auras indicate they've both been through something of an ordeal.
Roger, meantime, checks in with the SANDMAN operatives on the ground, lets them know the big boys from Huntsville have arrived. After, Mitch fills Roger and Charley in quickly on what he saw: definite evidence of History-B exposure, the same kind of exposure for both Calvin and Charlie.
MITCH What's our remit, here?
ROGER We gotta find out if what happened to them edged over into Enemy territory. See if the plan got further out of control. They're going to the place where it happened and point it out; we're gonna go scan that and see what's going on there. Once they take them in a room and hypnotize them, we gotta listen in and get as much as we can about what happened, in case it wasn't according to the plan, and then we can see what the Enemy is up to.
MITCH The History-B energy that they were exposed to suggests that something happened here that was not part of the Working Group's methodology, right? They're not going for actual UFO abductions, which is what happened here. So already we can say this is something that that's not what they wanted to have happen here.
ROGER But did one happen, then the other? Did SANDMAN do that and then they were abducted? Did the SANDMAN people get abducted and their brains messed with so they don't remember what's going on, that they didn't do it? We need to get both stories to try and figure out what happened.
MITCH That's a good point, we should check on those guys.
ROGER Yeah, we should, too.
Roger knows the operation in question happened out of Keesler AFB, and its agenda was capture-and-release: abduct, install with memetics saying a new age is coming and everybody needs to be on guard for it. and then release.
ROGER The folks at Keesler we can get to later, especially since that's all been put on ice now. They're probably just kicking their heels there, and we can interview them later. We can follow these guys [Calvin and Charlie] now, find out what happened, the Enemy side of it, and then figure out whether Sandmen have been compromised. Which would just be par for the way that this was all such a fuckup.
MITCH Yeah, just a bad idea all around.
They tail the caravan and the news vans to the shipyard. There's even more people than there were at the sheriff's station. They decided to do it at the shipyard in part because they've got better security.
The group that's gathered around Hickson and Parker: Hickson's attorney, a medical doctor, sheriff's deputies, Hynek and his partner, various uniformed officers. Roger and Mitch use SANGUSH glyphs to infiltrate and get close. Mitch senses the History-B energy is stronger here. There was a recent breach, about a hundred or hundred and fifty feet up in the air, at the location of a SANDMAN stealth helicopter. The veil is still weak; if a triggering event happened (death, cult ritual, etc.) then it would rend. This is much worse than anything else reporting in ALLOCHTHON. Mitch also senses a something in the water, something below the surface, which means kulullû.
Kulullû riding Sandmen into Keesler AFB would be a nightmare scenario. Two breaches is worse than they'd thought. It's a bad scene. At least it's not currently growing and moving towards an immediate crisis per the St. Francis event.
Mitch, Roger, and Charley all three suddenly notice a loud humming sound, though all the machinery at the shipyard is turned off. None of the civilians react to it. Meanwhile Charlie Hickson lays out his fragmentary memories of abduction, pointing up at the sky to more or less the spot Mitch detected.
Roger follows the abductees and the hypnotist in, to eavesdrop, while Mitch stays outside and scans more, and Charley uses her headphones in the van to astrally project herself. Or rather, she tries to; the distracting vibration among other things stops her from successfully exiting her body.
As the abductees and their entourage gather in the crowded conference room inside the shipyard, Roger quietly takes a position in a corner, smoking a cigarette and listening. Hynek and his partner start to hypnotize Charlie, but only after taking Calvin out of the room so as not to cross-contaminate his memories.
Once all the preliminaries have been dealt with: Charlie explains what happened Thursday night. Charlie's known Calvin since he was a kid; he's a friend of Calvin's father. They fish, hunt, weld together. Regular young-man/middle-aged-man stuff with no queer subtext at all.
CHARLIE I had a long day at work. Just wanted to relax. It's a nice October night. Let's do it. There's a whole bunch of undeveloped land enclosed by shipyards and you know we don't fish right near the shipyard because obviously it's a lot of noise. It keeps the fish away. We go somewhere a little more peaceful. Down the shore a little ways. Are you going to eat anything that you actually catch here? Probably not, no. Everything was fine. Everything was going okay.
Hynek prompts him to describe what happened.
CHARLIE Well, I mean, it was a, a powerful sound, a sound the likes of which I have never heard before, it did sound like a giant zipper being unzipped, kind of, like a ratcheting, and I looked up, and there it was, larger than life, a kind of egg-shaped, blue, glowing, a vehicle, it was a vehicle.
Roger, a skilled hypnotist himself, evaluates the story as Hickson tells it. The memories are a little confused, lacking the certainty one wants from a hypnotic subject. It's almost like he's trying to collate two different kinds of information coming at him: sensory information, especially the sound that he described and the sight that he saw in the sky.
At this point the narrative turns to something that seems more certain: he saw coming out of the vehicle a cylindrical being about five foot high, with wrinkled gray skin, two pincers on very, very long sort of windy limbs, and kind of a beak and two depressions where the eyes would be. A couple of the sheriff's deputies emit involuntary little snickers, but Hixson is dead serious.
CHARLIE They seemed like machines. They seemed like machines, like they were on a track, and they floated out of the vehicle, and came down, and we were both frozen, and then I felt a pinch in my arm and things got real blurry.
Meanwhile, outside, Mitch is poking around on the shore, just walking slowly around and looking at the ground, waiting to see or hear something. Some shells, a lot of litter, the usual junk one would find at the shore by a shipyard. Then, at his feet, he spies a tranquilizer dart, something SANDMAN-issued.
Dumb OZYMANDIAS jerks, Mitch thinks, to leave a piece of evidence like this laying around. He picks the dart up and feels a sudden flare of Anunnaki influence, a flare of History-B energy and it turns into a kulullû's gagkula dart-thrower. Then it turns back again, like the object is caught between two states: a reality shard.
MITCH Okay, doesn't seem like a good thing.
Sunday. October 14, 1973. Almagordo, New Mexico. Jocasta decided not to bury Tony immediately, for fear of the Anunnaki sucking up his soul or something like that. Meanwhile Marshall is interested in whatever Anunnaki influence Morris might detect in the region, which is to say, at White Sands Proving Grounds. Morris senses a wide thinness, a vast weakening, all across White Sands.
Surely SANDMAN has the Trinity test site locked down. Surely! It's a rocket test range, after all, where captured V2s were experimented on during World War II, and of course the Bomb.
MORRIS So that gets me wondering, what the hell have they been shooting at out here? Are there Sandmen at the Proving Grounds?
MARSHALL Well, maybe we should check out the Air Force base, then. That would seem to be … the next logical move. What do you think, Jocasta?
JOCASTA Sounds good to me. (A long pause). What I saw here was a little too scattered to make any kind of actionable judgment, but … I saw the same kind of disruption and sensed the same kind of thing … I know this doesn't help very much but this whole area is just saturated with bad vibes.
MORRIS I agree with that. I wanna ask the two of you —
JOCASTA — this is also — I don't know what everyone else has found out back East, but this area also figures extremely heavily in a lot of the occult publications that I've been researching. And if we now know — which I believe we do — that the messages in those magazines are part of a meme that the Working Group was putting out, there's something they want everybody to know about this area. Like they're trying to establish this place as something relevant to that meme of 'the New Age coming' and human transformation.
Marshall has read Morris in on portions of the larger URIEL project, including the existence of traitors within SANDMAN and the ongoing hunt for Alpha Leonis, who — he informs Morris — is “loosely” associated with one of URIEL’s members and has been involved with a cult in the past.
MORRIS If they're doing a bunch of things, as Jocasta says, to bring people awareness of what's going on here, it's maybe … it's to observe, right? Maybe the White Sands Proving Ground isn't just a proving ground for missiles. Maybe it's a proving ground for people.
Morris goes down the list of all the projects and material located on the on the base. High-tech surveillance, satellites and everything else.
MORRIS Maybe they let him onto the grounds?
JOCASTA Also, I don't know how this connects, but I think we're at the point where we all know there's no such thing as coincidence, in the in this environment. That clerk at the hotel, whether he knows it or not, knows something about Alpha Leonis. And something regarding History B happened to him even before that. The odds of that of those things being unconnected are zero
MARSHALL Right. (thinking) How long has it been since the first testing of the Bomb?
JOCASTA Trinity happened in '45, so twenty-eight years.
MARSHALL Alpha Leonis is older than that …
JOCASTA I think something happened to him in the '50s, the mid-50s.
Marshall brainstorms for a bit.
MARSHALL Hmm. Right now I'm thinking, two possible tracks. One, the Bomb, and how the Bomb triggered some sort of subduction event, or clash of histories. Or the Bomb was used defensively because of a subduction event or something? But then I think something else weird happened here related to that, that like flipped the town, or something, because that motel owner … I'm wondering if there was basically a Saint Francis event here around the testing of the Bomb. But the timing doesn't quite work out. We should go to the Air Force Base.
There's a little discussion of whether visiting the missile test area directly would be profitable; it would allow Morris to sense the Anunnaki influence from closer-up. Or perhaps the Trinity site itself?
MORRIS (to Jocasta) Would you be all right? If the vibes are bad here, the vibes where the first nuclear device was detonated would have to be a lot more dicey…
MARSHALL Well, now I'm really tempted.
MORRIS Do we need backup? How would we get backup?
MARSHALL Hmm, maybe we don't go there. We don't know at all what to expect. Maybe that's a bridge too far and we should go to the Air Force Base.
JOCASTA We have SANDMAN people at the base, right? Or are they all in Alabama for ALLOCHTHON?
While he considers, Marshall recalls his conversation with Jolly West about Alpha Leonis.
Saturday. October 13, 1973. Meanwhile, the day before, in Mississippi … Charlie Hickson has just described the pinch in his arm that knocked him out and Mitch has just found the reality shard that did the deed.
CHARLIE The next thing I know, I'm, I'm on the ship. They, they kind of floated me there.
HYNEK What do you mean, 'floated you there'? Were you floating in the air?
CHARLIE I can't describe what happened. I was floating and I wasn't floating and you know.
The mood in the room darkens.
CHARLIE When I wake up he's, the … the thing has got his pincer on me. He's holding me down, and I'm trying to like touch him with my other arm, my hand, and, it's like a, like an elephant's skin. Like a, it's wrinkled but it's … is it skin? Is it flesh? Is it metal?
Charlie is evidently confused and disturbed by the conflicting memories.
CHARLIE Oh, God, this is like … this is like Korea! Christ! That time we almost died, north of the 38th parallel …
HYNEK Charlie, I need you to come back to 1973. I need you to come back to being on board the craft.
CHARLIE They got me! They got me! I'm on a table, there's a there's a wall, it's … it's all blue, it … The light is blue. It's flashing in my eyes!
HYNEK It's flashing in your eyes?
CHARLIE I'm, I'm here, but I'm also in Korea in '52. I, I'm …
HYNEK All right. But what is happening to you on board the craft?
CHARLIE The wall, it's not a wall, it's a screen. It's like, it's like a TV. It's, it's showing me things.
HYNEK What are they showing you?
CHARLIE There's this thing that comes out of the wall. It looks like a big eye. It's a big round ball. It's glowing red.
Roger, skilled hypnotist that he is, can tell Charlie is indeed describing what happened to him on board the craft, but in two different times. Hynek doesn't grasp this, he's editing the narrative down to a single experience. Roger reflects that unfortunately, there's no way for him to intervene; once the pattern of the hypnotist's voice is established, adding another voice only distracts the subject.
Meanwhile, Charley reaches the astral and floats invisibly into the room.
CHARLIE There's a crystal inside the orb.
HYNEK Crystal? What is it? Is it, is it clear?
CHARLIE It's cloudy. I got the feeling it's causing the orb to glow, and the glow … my God! It's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life! It's like there's death in there!
HYNEK You're not gonna die, Charlie, you're just fine. What happens next?
CHARLIE There's that zip and sound again, and we're coming out of the saucer. They're floating us down. I'm shouting for Calvin. They took him away from me when I was in there, and I'm shouting for him. 'Calvin come out!' And I can't say anything, my vocal cords are just frozen. I'm just … I'm so scared. I've never been this scared. I saw death in there. The car is here. I'm leaning on it but my hand goes right through the windshield, right through the window, passenger windows has just gotten dislodged … and there's that zipping sound again. and then I hear … it sounds like a propeller … and I look up, and the blue saucer is gone, and cows on the ground over there …
HYNEK All right. When I finish counting from five, you're gonna wake up, and you're gonna feel rested and relaxed.
As Hynek brings Charlie out of the trance Roger and Charley can see how shaken all the men in the room are by this eerie narrative. The sheriff, a man about Charlie Hickson's age, that Korea stuff got to him, too.
HYNEK All right, why don't you go take a moment … That was really valuable information, thank you so much. We should probably bring Calvin in here and try him.
CHARLIE (still anxious, despite Hynek's attempts to calm him as he ended the trance) If you say it was important information … I'm gonna get Cal to come in.
Roger follows Charlie out of the room and checks in with him.
ROGER Hey man, I hope you're calm and cool, like they're supposed to have you come out of trance. But if you're feeling any kind of overwhelmed, you know I'm here, man, just talk to me about how it is. I've been there.
The sheriff's deputy escorting Charlie assumes that Roger is meant to be there, thanks to the SAN.GUSH glyph, and nods solemnly as Charlie thanks Roger and accepts a business card. Charlie and Calvin exchange a terse greeting, and Calvin goes in for his own hypnosis session.
Meanwhile outside, Mitch puts the reality shard dart in a plastic evidence bag and heads back to the SANDMAN van where Charley's body awaits her soul's return.
Up in the office, Charley's soul observes as Hynek prepares to put Calvin into trance. Roger, again using the SAN.GUSH glyph for legitimacy, warns Hynek that the subjects might be conflating two sets of memories and letting them move slowly to walk through the experiences might be helpful, to disambiguate the memories.
HYNEK I found it … I found it very interesting that he conflated one set of traumatic memories with the trauma that he's just experienced. What were they, you know, twenty years apart? Something about this experience reminded him of the last time his life was threatened, under fire in Korea. That's a, that's a, that's a very salient piece of evidence, um, yes.
ROGER Your technique of keeping him perfectly calm, and and letting him have his rational dissociated self, was excellent. But if you want him to to see what he saw, you may have to let him see other things that were traumatic in the past, just to serve as a way to pass through. Honestly, what I was hearing and observing was that it was very, very real. Like it was being there, and if you try to disassociate it from it, you might flip up some of the other things that were happening right around it, in terms of sensory input.
HYNEK (nodding) There's definitely more there, yeah. There's definitely more there. There are limits to what we want to do today, there's limits to what they agreed to do today, but there there is definitely more there. Now, gentlemen, before, um, young Mr Parker comes in, we've all seen he's in a much more delicate state of mind. Let's just keep that in mind as this goes on. He may come out of trance early, he may need some reapplication of the hypnotism, I just want everybody to be ready for that. It may be a little bit of a wild ride.
Calvin Parker enters and settles in. Roger, expert hypnotist that he is, can see that he is indeed more agitated and slower to enter the trance state. Once he is entranced, however, his recollection of the first part of the experience is almost identical to what Charlie Hickson described. He heard the same zipping sound. His descriptions don't match a stealth helicopter at all. His description of the flying saucer is almost identical: two big portholes like eyes, a kind of teardrop shaped blue machine. Calvin does not use the descriptor 'machines' to describe what he interacted with; he calls them 'creatures,' but otherwise his description is note for note the same as Charlie's.
Calvin does not describe being pierced or being knocked out; he was conscious when they brought him into the ship. He displays no double memories of helicopters, or the sounds of propellers, or blades throughout this entire recollection. Agitated, he almost comes out of trance a couple of times but Hynek manages to maintain control.
When he got onto the ship, Calvin said, he was separated from Hickson, and here things diverge a little bit: he does describe being strapped down to a table, he does describe feeling like he can't move, but does not describe anything about the walls turning blue. Nor does he describe an eye. He does describe the orb, almost exactly as Hickson did. He does not describe a scene,
Roger can tell he's blocking out part of the memory. Hynek doesn't push him, and the descriptions are all a little bit too vague. Roger believes that there's more there, just like there was with Hickson. Calvin describes the rest of his captivity on the ship as solitary, with no interaction with anything or anyone. He does feel like the entities (and he describes more than one of them) were close by. He doesn't know whether they were the ones holding him down or whether he was just paralyzed, and the orb in his telling is merely present, not throbbing or giving him a sense of death, just nearby.
After this relatively unsatisfying set of elicited memories he describes floating down out of the ship, and finding Hickson right near the car.
Roger concludes that Calvin probably had some kind of memory-changing glyph used on him, and had a much harder time dealing with it than Hickson did. Charley interprets the difference between their two experiences differently: that Hickson was more open to this kind of experience, but Parker had a deeper experience that is more thoroughly buried. There's more, deeper, there in Calvin that needs to be uncovered, and it's just not going to yield to an ordinary hypnotist who doesn't know about History-B.
It's kind of an unsatisfying ending; the vibe in the room is one of disappointment. The various sheriff's deputies, and Hynek himself, were ready for more weirdness from Calvin than merely recapitulating Charlie's experience.
HYNEK Folks, both of these men have been through an experience … Gentlemen, they have been through an experience that we cannot explain through 'non-paranormal' means and methods. These men have experienced something we quite simply cannot identify. These men are going to need support, they're gonna need protection, given how much word has gotten out about them. But they should also be allowed to live their lives. At this point law enforcement knows, the military knows, there's not much else we can do, but give them all the support your community can. If they wish to undergo further hypnosis, the people in my organization will be more than willing to come out here and do it again, but it's not the kind of thing we want to risk … going to the well too often?
Charley wakes up in the car with Mitch and they watch everybody leave the offices. Hynek and his partner go over to talk to the media, while the law enforcement folks get ready to drive Calvin and Charlie home.
Roger takes the moment to hang back and reiterate to Charlie Hickson that he represents a veteran's support group, able to counsel about traumatic events.
ROGER If you need somebody to talk to, just give me a call. Because what you said rocked my world, you know? I can understand like how you may get messed up by this, man, and if you need to talk … You don't need to be depressed, you don't need to perform for all those people. Just reach out. It gets really lonely out there and you don't want to go to a bad place.
Maybe Hickson will call Roger, but Roger's main hope is that he's laying sufficient seed for Hickson to be amenable to a friendly approach later on.
Once Roger has rejoined Mitch and Charley, Mitch holds up the little baggie with the shard in it. To Roger's eyes the reality shard looks like a conventional (so to speak) SANDMAN tranquilizer dart, the kind of thing Gottlieb would cook up in his Fort Dietrich lab.
ROGER (disappointed at the SANDMAN agents for leaving evidence at the scene) Okay, that's unprofessional.
Charley eyes the device and uses her training to perceive that it is both a gadkula but also a classified-technology tranquilizer dart. Their working theory right now is that the Anunnaki piggybacked on the OZYMANDIAS mission here: some sort of subduction happened while they were on board the craft, and the craft should have been a helicopter, but things flipped. What was left behind was this method of paralyzing the men that overlapped with the kulullû's dart gun. This Shard itself has powers that young Charley can identify: it attunes to whatever human being picks it up, and they can do what kulullû do with it: they can change the molecular structure of the drug in this thing's payload to any number of different paralytics, hallucinogens, etc.
Sunday. October 14, 1973. Back in New Mexico, Marshall asks Morris if he could locate Alpha Leonis. Morris doubts it; he doesn't share a connection to the man, never dropped acid with him the way he connected to Jocasta. Marshall reflects that they don't have anyone immediately available with a personal connection, until Jo reminds him about the hotel clerk who responded so oddly to Jo's questioning.
Jo recites the sentence in Sumerian that the clerk said to her, in her vision where he was covered in cuneiform tattoos. She doesn't speak Sumerian but she has a very good memory. Marshall does speak Sumerian, and recognizes it as 'this magician was a terrible man who had lots of wives, which is an abomination.'
Alpha Leonis having a lot of women with him, an ersatz cult harem, is part of his known methods. The clerk apparently found this especially unpleasant and memorable.
Morris detects faint traces of History-B there in the hotel lobby, leftover from the event the night before. The clerk remembered something and it bubbled up out of him, maybe a glyph he saw back in '65. Is it worth drilling into the guy to extract information a decade or so out of date? It seems strange to Marshall that this random hotel clerk is their best lead on Alpha Leonis, but everything URIEL does is strange.
Jocasta wonders if there might be more nine or ten-year-old kids in the area, foundlings from the Solarans.
It's easy enough to get the clerk into a cooperative state, what with ikoters and drugs and hypnosis and psionics and the brute force of the mind probe. Marshall hypnotizes the clerk and starts walking him through the memory, just as Hynek did with Charlie and Calvin, but Marshall has a tool Hynek did not: Jocasta. Jocasta touches the clerk and reaches into him to experience the memory.
March, 1965. Jocasta stands in the lobby, her eyes on Alpha Leonis. He looks like Mitch, just older. Al and the clerk are chatting like ex-cons. Al wants something from the clerk, but what isn't immediately clear. Drugs?
ALPHA LEONIS I've got five girls and they need attention. You got to know somebody who can take care of… I don't want to be a daddy to five kids, right? You don't. You've got to know somebody who can take care of that.
The clerk has a deep-seated moral conviction that abortion is murder, using the phrase "scrape jobs." He responds badly to the question.
Al, miffed, says a few words in Sumerian, an eriktu to stun him.
ALPHA LEONIS Don't tell anybody I was looking for this. I've got somewhere I can go to take care of this. I didn't want to have to call on them but I'll do it, so don't tell anybody I was looking for my girls to get abortions, all right?
The clerk, stunned, recovers and blinks and smiles as he shows Al to his rooms and the vision/memory ends.
Jocasta relates the experience to Marshall, filling in the gaps in the clerk's narrative. Alpha Leonis went to SANDMAN, it seems clear, and gave the pregnant women to them, or at least the kids. Everybody disappeared, except RAVEN who briefly surfaced months later. Jocasta, Morris, and Marshall decide to do some scans, looking for psychic children Charley's approximate age. Morris finds it creepy, but he does it.
Saturday. October 13, 1973. Early evening. In Pascagoula, Roger, Mitch, and Charley (but mostly Roger) decide that the first priority needs to be locking down the potential contamination of the OZYMANDIAS team at Keesler AFB. To that end, they call up Archie and brief him on what they've found.
Archie brainstorms: ALLOCHTHON personnel out to Keesler to decontaminate and confirm lack of Enemy infiltration of the team there, security team to secure the breach points, possibly Navy frogmen, memetic control, etc, etc.
The priority for Roger (et al) is to complete the debrief of the UFO abductees. That night they visit Calvin at his home. Roger calls once more on URIEL's most competent asset, the Devil, to use hypnosis on Calvin (Mitch probably mans the ikoter).
Kalfu can build upon the earlier hypnosis. He takes Calvin through being put onto the ship, the things with their pincers have got him pinned. He sees the orb, but this is when he started to hide things last time.
CALVIN I don't know what you want me to try and see.
THE DEVIL You need to see beyond, and you need to think. You must know the answer to this. Your life depends on it.
CALVIN (accelerated heart rate, breathing heavily) No, no! Keep away from me! She's, she's on top of me! She's reaching in into my body! Her fingers are up my nose, she's trying to get to my brain! Oh! I'm reaching up! Her face is a mask!
Mitch confirms Calvin is not in danger of cardiac arrest and is not possessed by any demons.
THE DEVIL You're there, but you're still safe. You just are remembering you're there.
CALVIN She's bringing the … she wants me to, she wants me to join them. She, she met me in the woods when I was little, by the river. She said she'd be back for me. She said time doesn't mean anything.
THE DEVIL Did she come out of the river, do you remember?
CALVIN Came down out of the sky every time. She says now's not the time but she can have me anytime she wants. Ugh! Ugh, from birth to death I'm hers. She's showing me the future. The world's falling apart! Disease! Americans killing each other! She says she's going to rescue us from it all, from poisoning our planet. She says I gotta carry the message, just keep leaking it out. I'm on a helicopter, but I'm not. There's two men. they're switched off, they're just staring into space. The pilot's just sitting there with his hand on the on the joystick.
THE DEVIL Is she there in the helicopter?
CALVIN I'm not in the helicopter, I'm in the saucer. And she's in the saucer. She says the most important message I gotta, oh, I have to tell you — Why ain't Mitch gone to see his mama yet?!
Mitch visibly winces, but says nothing.
There's a small bit more. Calvin starts talking about wings: her hair is like iridescent feathers, like a blackbird. The mask that she was wearing was an alien mask, and when the mask was was taken off, behind it was a six-winged black šêdu.
That night, Charley dreams:
She tosses and turns and opens her eyes, in this dream, to find herself inside a summoning Circle in someone's Edwardian drawing room/library. Candlelit, nice in a Gilded Age kind of way. A man in ceremonial robes stands before her, wand in hand.
The only man in ceremonial robes Charley has any acquaintance with in his lifetime is Stoney. It's not Stoney. He's about forty, rather handsome. Charley looks into his eyes and sees that he is one of her past lives.
He looks at this little girl who has appeared in his summoning circle, and says a name. He raises his wand in a futile attempt to abjure this thing he has summoned, for behind Charley is a crooked, robed, hourglass-wielding figure: Kronos, god of time.
Kronos is out of the circle in flash. The ceremonial magician gasps and ages forty years in seconds, dropping dead as Charley wakes up from her dream screaming, remembering the last moments of her 1877-1914 incarnation, upon whose death she reincarnated as Jack Parsons.