The 49th Mystic
© 2018 by Kiwone, Inc. f/s/o Ted Dekker
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1401-7
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible®, copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. (www.Lockman.org)
Scripture quotations labeled ABPE are from The Original Aramaic New Testament in Plain English—with Psalms & Proverbs. Copyright © 2007; 8th edition Copyright © 2013. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Scripture quotations labeled BLB are from The Holy Bible, Berean Literal Bible, BLB. Copyright © 2016 by Bible Hub. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations labeled ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2011
Scripture quotations labeled HCSB are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible®, copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2009 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Holman Christian Standard Bible®, Holman CSB®, and HCSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers.
Scripture quotations labeled ISV are from the International Standard Version, Copyright © 1995–2014 by ISV Foundation. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INTERNATIONALLY. Used by permission of Davidson Press, LLC.
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Scripture quotations labeled NIV are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Author is represented by Creative Trust Literary Group, LLC, 210 Jamestown Park Drive, Suite 200, Brentwood, TN 37027, www.creativetrust.com.
Past Praise for Ted Dekker
“[Dekker’s writing] may be a genre unto itself.”
—New York Times on A.D. 30
“Ted Dekker is a true master of thrillers.”
—Nelson DeMille, New York Times bestselling author on BoneMan’s Daughters
“A daring and completely riveting thriller.”
—Booklist on The Priest’s Graveyard
“The depth of insight and development into characters is outstanding. . . . This is a must read.”
—RT Book Reviews, Top Pick on A.D. 30
“If you’ve never visited Ted Dekker’s world, do it. Beguiling, compelling, challenging, and riveting—fantastic, gimmick-free storytelling—that’s what you get with Ted Dekker. Don’t pass this one up.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author on The Priest’s Graveyard
“Ted Dekker is a master of suspense.”
—Library Journal
“Dekker pens an absorbing thriller that convincingly blurs the lines between fantasy and reality.”
—Publishers Weekly on Red
“A tour-de-force of suspense that demands to be read in one sitting.”
—James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author on BoneMan’s Daughters
“A thrill-a-minute ride, with heart-pounding action and a twist that you’ll never see coming.”
—Tess Gerritsen, New York Times bestselling author of Ice Cold on The Priest’s Graveyard
“An amazing novel, utterly compelling, intensely readable, well written, and completely original.”
—Douglas Preston, co-creator of the famed Pendergast series on The Priest’s Graveyard
“[It] will haunt you—long after you want it to.”
—Brad Meltzer, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Fate and The Inner Circle on The Priest’s Graveyard
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Past Praise for Ted Dekker
Epigraph
Foreword
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
Author’s Note
About the Author
Back Ad
Tayla’s Journal
Back Cover
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm.
Song of Songs 8:6 ESV
You are about to escape the old, limiting confines of your mind. The ride is wild and sometimes bumpy, so hold on tight. There is no greater thrill than finding freedom from the shackles of a common existence. The status quo is no life at all.
All of the neuroscience and psychology herein is firmly established. If in doubt, google it.
In addition, the nature of reality as demonstrated by Talya can be found in excerpts taken from his journal at the end of this novel. If in doubt, read it.
And so it begins . . .
PROLOGUE
I’M WALKING through a field of yellow daisies, wanting to love the way they sway in a gentle breeze, wanting to enjoy the scents of fresh earth and natural grasses, the bright blue sky, the sound of chirping birds in the trees just ahead of me. Wanting to love it all but not quite able to, because a voice deep in my mind tells me that it will change any minute now. Any second. And when it changes, I’ll wish I was dead.
I run my hand through the tall grass, determined not to listen to that voice, because I’m smart enough to know that people get into trouble when they pay too much attention to the crazy voices that run through their minds. Not me. Not this time.
Still, the ancient memory of something off-color haunts me, so I stop thirty feet from the tall pine trees and look around, just to be sure.
Nothing. Nothing but tall swaying grass and thousands of bright daisies. It’s all slightly blurry to me because my eyesight isn’t the best, but it’s peaceful and full of wonder all the same. And not a sound except for the chirping birds.
See? It’s okay. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing to be afraid of.
So I start walking again.
I make it five steps before that distant dread finds me once more, insisting that something really is wrong. Terribly wrong.
My house is through the trees, maybe a hundred yards away, and I d
ecide then that I have no business being out in the field. God only knows what could happen to a girl walking alone in a field. I walk faster, straight for the trees, and I begin to hum for comfort, for distraction from my thoughts.
The first three notes are sweet and high.
The fourth comes out low and guttural, snarling with static, and I pull up sharply, terrified to breathe. The sound had come from inside of me?
No, it comes from behind me, a loud, crackling roar that slams my heart into my throat. I spin toward the house and tear for safety with the threat at my back, gaining, gaining.
I sprint through the trees, running without thought of the ground I’m covering. Praying I’ll make it. Desperate.
Just before the roar reaches me, I crash through the front door and slam it shut. For the briefest moment, I think I am safe.
But now I hear a sound behind me. A soft chuckle. I jerk around with the door now at my back, and I see him. A tall man with slicked-back hair and penetrating red eyes.
Shadow Man.
I’ve seen him before, many times, and I know what he’s going to say. What he’s going to do. And although my lungs are frozen and my throat is tight, my mind is screaming.
“Hello, Rachelle,” he says, drawing out each word through a slight grin. “Do you know what seven times seven is?”
I remember now. All of it. He’s asked me the same question a thousand times and I know what he’s going to do, but still I can’t move.
“Forty-nine, the fullness of all that is,” he says. “All the darkness and all the fear in the world, dumped into one worthless girl.” He takes a step toward me, eyes gleaming with anticipation. “She must be punished for her failure. You know what that means, don’t you, 49th?”
I am so terrified that my mind begins to go numb. Waves of heat rush through my body. I want to run, to find my father, to hide. But my legs are lead.
“I’m going to blind you.” Another step. “And when you see again, I’m going to blind you again. And again. And again, until even the thought of seeing makes you want to puke, because you know that I’m only going to blind you again.”
Another step. I’m trembling and I can smell his putrid breath. It’s like dirty socks that have been deodorized with vanilla.
“Because of you, and through you, I’m going to blind the whole world. What happens to you happens to them all. It’s all your fault, and they’re going to hate you even more than they already do.”
A weak plea manages to squeak past my throat. “Please . . .”
“This is only a fore-shadow.”
In a flash he’s on me, slamming me against the door, prying my eyes wide as I flail in a hopeless attempt to free myself from his iron grip. I know what he’s doing. I think I would rather he kill me.
His mouth is spread wide, and in that last moment as my first screams fill the air, Shadow Man becomes himself, a shadow shaped like a cobra, spitting venom into both of my eyes.
Excruciating pain slices into my head and lights every nerve in my body on fire.
I bolt up in bed, screaming.
I didn’t know I was asleep. I never do. But now I know I’m awake.
And that I’m blind.
1
IT WAS the same nightmare I’d had every night for the past ten years, beginning at age six. The dream betrayed my deepest fears that nothing would ever change, but still, it was just a dream. I reminded myself every morning.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
My name is Rachelle Matthews, and I was born in a small mountain community well off the grid. The town was roughly ninety miles southeast of Salt Lake City, Utah—close enough to find help if the need arose, and far enough to be a world unto itself. When I say off the grid I mean completely self-sustaining in every way imaginable.
Eden, population 153 at last counting, sourced its own utilities and food, all generated and grown within the valley. We had our own law enforcement, our own hospital, our own government, and everything else required to sustain and protect life on an island.
Only we weren’t on an island. We were in a deep mountain valley shaped like a bowl roughly two miles in diameter. Actually, most geologists would call the huge depression in the Rocky Mountains a sinkhole rather than a valley, but who wants to call their home a sinkhole? Certainly not Simon Moses, founder and incorporator of Eden, Utah. He envisioned a heaven on earth, a safe and peaceful environment, the polar opposite of the conflicted world we lived in.
But Eden was a sinkhole. My father, David, said the tall red cliffs that surrounded the valley made that much clear. And the only way in or out of the sinkhole was through a three-hundred-foot-long tunnel near the top of the western face.
My father once told me Eden looked like God had taken his walking stick and slammed it down into the middle of the mountains.
I was only seven at the time, and it was easy for me to picture a huge God standing over me with a stick, ready to hit me if I wandered off the proper path. That’s what Simon Moses, whom we also called the Judge, preached. The last thing I wanted was to be squashed by that stick when God slammed it down.
“I don’t like that image,” I said. “And you don’t really believe in God.”
“Sure I do. Just not the way everyone else here does.” My father believed God was more in our minds than he was a person in the sky with a big stick. “Either way, one day you’ll be able to see the cliffs for yourself and you’ll see just how beautiful they are,” he said.
I couldn’t see the cliffs the way my father did, because I’d been blind since I was a baby. Miranda said I probably had seen for the first five or six months, until the irregular formation of my red blood cells, a result of sickle cell anemia, caused all kinds of complications. Among them, very fair skin and damaged retinas.
My father was a psychotherapist, not a physician, but he’d made the healing of my blindness his life’s sole ambition, and he knew more about how the brain and body work than most doctors. According to him, there was something more than sickle cell going on with me. Sickle cell was an inherited disease passed on by one or both parents who have the same trait. Neither my mother nor my father had this trait.
He sometimes wondered if my sickle cell anemia was linked to the complications and stress of my birth, which nearly killed me and did kill my mother, also named Rachelle. She’d given her life for mine, he once said. He’d never quite recovered from her death. Neither had I.
Still, I had learned to be practical about my situation in life, despite all the fears that haunted me. I had no mother, but I had a father who was sure I would see again if I followed his way. And I believed in a God who would ultimately save me if I was very careful and followed his way. I thought of my dad and God as two halves of a whole, both offering me hope.
In fact, I did have sight, just not the typical kind. Actually, I saw two different ways.
The first way was in my dreams. Not only did I dream in color, my dreams felt, smelled, and looked more real than anything in my waking blind life. Everything was still a little fuzzy and muted, but clear enough for me to experience it visually. For me, it was vivid seeing, because I had nothing else to compare it to.
Why I could see in color while dreaming was the subject of wild speculation. Maybe because I hadn’t been blind for the first few months of my life, I knew what color looked like. But infants don’t really see color well at that stage. And in my dreams I did.
The problem was, most of my dreams were nightmares of Shadow Man always saying the same thing, always blinding me, mocking me, condemning me. Those nightmares weren’t just kinda real, but so real that I dreaded falling asleep. I called it my nightmare sight.
From a psychological perspective, nightmares don’t create new fears as much as they reflect deep hidden fears. The mind has to process these in some abstract way so it won’t melt down.
What kinds of fears? For starters, the fear that I would always be blind, always suffer the same nightmares that had haunted
me for the past ten years. Every time I closed my eyes to sleep I begged God to take away my nightmare sight.
But I had other more common fears as well. In fact, all negative emotions are rooted in fear, most commonly fear of loss, my father said. The fear of losing worthiness created jealousy, fear of losing honor created anger, fear of losing security created anxiety, and so it went. In the end, fear was the only challenge facing all humans, he believed.
The second kind of sight I experienced had nothing to do with sleep. While awake, I saw through echolocation, the same kind of “sight” that bats and dolphins use. I wasn’t the first human to “see” in this way, but my father said I was probably among the best. Daniel Kish, perhaps the best-known blind man in the world and a hero to me, had his eyes removed in 1967 at thirteen months old due to retinal cancer. He mastered echolocation well enough to ride his bicycle through any park.
A specialist had come to the valley to examine me on two different occasions, and he’d been so impressed with my ability that he begged my father to allow further testing. So many blind people could benefit if we allowed him to study my brain, he insisted. The thought terrified me. My father refused.
While awake and using echolocation, I didn’t see color. Or any definition, like features on a face. I only saw shapes. I saw them by clicking my tongue and almost immediately hearing the sound waves that returned to me after reflecting off objects. My brain took those very faint echoes and measured the distance, size, and shape of those objects around me, then sent the information to my visual cortex, where an image was created.
How can the brain learn to see shapes based on sound waves? One word: neuroplasticity. Not so long ago, science commonly held that the brain’s neurons were essentially fixed at birth through genetic imprinting, but evidence to the contrary showed how the mind can create any number of new neurons and rewire old ones based on environmental input.
The first study to examine a human utilizing echolocation was in 2014, when researchers used fMRI to take high-resolution images of the brain while subjects who’d learned to echolocate clicked and “saw.” Surprisingly, the visual cortex at the back of the brain, not the auditory centers of the brain, lit up, showing pronounced neural activity. The subjects really were “seeing” with the visual cortex. Their brains had rewired themselves to use sound and ears rather than light and eyes to perceive shapes, dimensions, and distances.