There is plenty of mystery within this trilogy, but it is not mystery in terms of crime (as with Sherlock Holmes), suspense, or science fiction, but spiritual mystery. However, the following snippets that follow a specific event highlighted by revelations from the spirit being for Good known as the ‘witch of the Hovels’ do incorporate crime and suspense themes. All of these snippets are found within the second book of the trilogy, The Prophesied Band.
The first snippet from Chapter Six finds the band Sound Unltd meeting with their manager Joe Phillips in spring, 1996, about the Asia leg of a tour that began the previous year and had to be rescheduled due to a crisis event that I will not issue a spoiler alert over. When that issue was settled, the guitarist-producer, Mick, then brought up the following relating to an archeological dig near his Holyhope Castle in the mountain area of eastern Wales. Mick is an occultist obsessed with the ancient High Priest of a pagan and cannibal cult, called Crynnwagg. The cult is called the Crag-Dwellers.
“…I’ve invited some archeologists up to Holyhope to dig for Crynnwagg’s bones.”
The drummer laughed. “You mean to tell us, Skinny, that your hero Crynnwagg’s bones just happen to be on your estate?”
Mick snickered. “No, Shorty, they’re not, eh? The archeologists are Druid scholars, they’re staying at Holyhope, and their digging site is four miles west of there at the foothills of—”
“You funding it, too?” Keith asked.
“Yeh, through the Druidic Foundation. Made contact with them four years ago. Only now are they done with their paperwork.”
The second snippet from Chapter Seven, partially referenced here, involves a phone conversation between Mick and pop culture magazine freelancer Jay Elliot, who is the narrator of The Prophesied Band. Elliot had heard over his car radio that an earthquake, an extreme rarity in Wales, had occurred in the area where the archeological dig was taking place. It is summer, 1998. In the conversation is mentioned that both Crynnwagg and Swami Negran had long tibias. Negran, whom had ensnared the band in his plot to win souls of fans as well as the souls of the sextet band using the red crystal amulets each of the six had worn during concerts, with the amulets being controlled by Swami, had supposedly recently died in a car crash.
“So,” I finally asked, “did the earthquake help you find the bones?”
“That they did. Or at least we’re speculating they’re his bones. Crynnwagg was known through legend to have had tibia bones much longer than they should have been.”
“Long-shanks.” Which reminded me of a long-ago English king.
“Yeh.” Snort. “And like Swami Negran, too. Little murdering bastard!”
By this time the word had gotten out that Negran was the one who did in Adam Bloodlove. Mick made sure of that. But no one could bring the Indian mystic to justice. The man supposedly had been killed by a Christian radical in a so-called car crash.
“And no one can find his red crystal,” I said.
“Joe thinks his father and his elitist cronies hid the crystal somewhere and they’re using it. I mean, all the crap with the weather. Shit, Jay, southern England’s drying up, and they’re literally drowning in Walltown. Jack and Keith have been up there about a month now. They think they’ve found some Code manuscripts in an iron vault, but they can’t open the vault until it stops raining. And who the hell ever heard of earthquakes in Wales? Torquay and them are definitely screwing around with the weather.”
I laughed, especially since he had no proof. “You sound like those militia-types we have here in the States.”
Pordengreau snorted several times. “You know I’ve never believed that shit until now. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff Tom’s gotten out of Tina how Torquay and Effingchester are out to control the planet.”
“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.” Of course, I still wasn’t convinced that anti-new-order stuff wasn’t anything more than sheer paranoia. “So, what’s gonna happen to the bones?”
“They’ll be sent to the Archeological Society for carbon-dating. If the bones are about nineteen-hundred-fifty-years-old, we’ll be fairly sure they’re Crynnwagg’s.”
The rest of the snippets come from Chapter Nine. The mysterious ‘witch of the hovels’ had summoned two of the band members to meet with her in the home town Victoria Park near the angelic statue called The Tooters. The meeting took place early June, 2000.
Tom, Keith, Jack, Billy Prestin—with whom Jack stayed while in town—and new arrival Bryan sat facing each other at a chessboard table under a shade tree several yards at a diagonal to the famed statue.
“Mick’s on his way,” Bry told the others. “Spoke to him on the phone at my folks’ place. And he has what he calls ‘scary’ news about Crynnwagg’s bones.”
“Scary news?” Tom said. “Right. He’ll probably tell us they’re Adam Bloodlove’s.”
“You know Mick. Loves to be occultically dramatic.”
After discussing the reason for the meeting, Mick finally shows up with news regarding Crynnwagg’s bones. The “King” referenced is Edward II, known as “Longshanks” in the movie Braveheart.
The five and Prestin didn’t have to wait much longer for Mick. When he showed up, the sun was heading down over the shadowy horizon of council houses and ship yards. A shadowy pall rose slowly up the south face of The Tooters, heightening the tall one’s mask of gloom.
After greetings, Tom asked, “So, Skinny, what’s up at the bone yard?”
Pordengreau, who once wore gaily colored robes to match is gay-ly lifestyle, now tended toward jeans and t-shirts with cartoon characters. Further, it was rumored he had started shunning other men. The horrifying fate of former lover Adam Bloodlove did a psychological number on the lanky one.
Who now began hyperventilating.
“What’s wrong, Mick?” Jack asked.
The lanky one composed himself. “Um, look, what I have to tell you scares the shit outta me. It’s too unbelievable.”
Tom asked, “Is this the reason you’ve had to wait so long to find out if the bones were Crynnwagg’s?”
Deep sigh. “They’re not Crynnwagg’s.” Another sigh along with a pounding heart. “They’re Swami Negran’s.”
As if ordained by God that this startling news should quiet all sound, the life of the park came to a standstill.
Six eye-popping faces on bodies taken aback, froze.
“The bones are not fourteen-hundred-or-so-years-old. The bones are so recent that carbon fourteen-dating can’t register them.” Mick spoke as if entranced to an audience of zombies. “I found that out several months ago. So then they began to narrow it down to dental records and the fact that both Crynnwagg and Swami had long-shanks.”
That last phrase awakened Jack. “Like that King.”
“Yeh. But having narrowed the candidates to people with long tibias, and me telling the university people that Swami had those kinda bones, they sent for Negran’s dental records, and voila! Match.”
By then everyone else had come out of his comatose state.
“But no one believed it at first. Not me or the team I sponsored. Swami was killed in a car crash, eh? Which would mean at least some of his bones would have been mutilated in the crash. News reports said the whole right side of his body was smashed. But these bones don’t show that. It’s as if he died a natural death with no bone deterioration. Like I said, no one could believe that. Negran was about middle-aged, when most people start losing bone calcium, or something. Not these bones. They’re almost perfect. But that’s not the scary part, eh?” He didn’t wait for anyone to respond to that. “The scary part is his crystal. The university people didn’t find his crystal with his bones, eh? But after all those months and then concluding the bones were Swami’s, that crystal showed up within his jawbones a day or so after I was contacted. Yesterday, in fact. I was busy in production—”
“You know,” Jack interrupted, “it’s funny that crystal showed up the very day the witch contacted me.”
“What witch?” Mick asked.
“The old lady who told us that Swami killed Adam. That witch, remember?”
“Oh yeh, that witch.”
Having dabbled in the occult most of his life, Pordengreau was unfazed by what he heard and would soon hear.
With every band member now at the meeting, ‘that witch of the Hovels’ then shows up to tell them why the red crystal associated with Crynnwagg was not found with the bones, but mysteriously showed up at Crynnwagg’s skull a day or two before the meeting. And the truth about the red crystal, which belonged to the fallen angel, Corion, whom God had cast into ‘the Abyss’ in the ‘beforetime.’ In between her paragraphs, some band members ask her questions which do not need to be referenced here.
“…Listen to what I have learned from The Tooters. Corion is the wayward son of The Creator of All Things, the One you call God. Corion is called Satan by most. Corion is the name given the Evil by a Druidic Age sect of cannibals called the Crag-Dwellers.” She looked at Mick. “You in particular have studied them.” To all she said, “None of you, however, knows the story you must know. In the year 50 AD, before the onslaught of the Romans, the Crag-Dweller High Priest Crynnwagg was killed by a group of Druid Priests called the Legion of the Twisted Oak, his blood drained and consumed by those priests in a cup of blood. You know this and wrote a song about this called ‘Crynnwagg’s Cup of Blood.’ In your other Crag-Dweller song, ‘The Rune of Seven-Crag Mountain,’ it is told how the Crag-Dwellers tied fourteen Druid children to oak trees and burned them in retribution. What you may not know is that Crynnwagg returned from the dead by the black magic of Corion’s Demons.”
“So Crynnwagg returned from the dead thanks to Corion’s Demons. But before he left the Abyss in which God exiled Corion, Crynnwagg stole Corion’s red crystal sight by which Corion could see his way in the black abyss. I do not know why Crynnwagg did this. Only God knows. But Crynnwagg did this thing and returned to the world using the crystal for godly power. The greatest of these powers is immortality. Crynnwagg would live forever, so he believed. That is, he would appear to die as anyone else, but then he would arise and take the form of another.
“Eventually, his Crag-Dweller sect was defeated by, first, Roman Legions, then by Christianity, various conquerors and the Normans under William the Conqueror. During this time in the late eleventh century, the bearer of the crystal was killed in battle by a young knight, who, of course, stole the crystal not knowing its powers at first. He learned, however, and used the powers to convince the king to make him a Duke. Thus the First Duke of Effingchester was created. Through succeeding generations, these Dukes became some of the kingdom’s most powerful landowners. Then came a moody madman, the Fourth Duke. He could be quite worthy, as in 1135 when he established throughout his land holdings—which of course included Walltown—new freedoms and less taxes. But he always had a dark side. He would not emancipate his serfs. He just couldn’t do it. I don’t know why. Serfdom was disappearing throughout Britain, and his serfs knew that, too. So these poor peasants, in July, 1136, tried in great vain to win their freedom. I know this because I was there. A few blocks from here in the old Hovels. The serfs were almost victorious because many freemen, called yeomen—themselves former serfs—aided their cause. So seeing himself being defeated in shame, the old Duke used the same crystal stolen by the First Duke to summon the Corion’s Demons. It took only three of them—Gold, Silver, and Bronze Demons—to burn Walltown to the ground.”
“To go on. When Effingchester number four summoned those Demons, he also prayed Corion to take back the crystal. The Duke threw the crystal in the air as Corion had told him, but Crynnwagg—as the Duke’s manservant—not Corion, caught the crystal instead. This did not please Corion one bit! So Corion put a curse on the Effingchesters for eternity.”
“…Crynnwagg survived the ages as various people of various walks of life. As a lesser duke in 1776, he formed the Society of Luminaries. In 1879, Crynnwagg, as a socialist philosopher, founded the Ring of Our Lord Lucifer, which, like the Luminaries, believed and strove for a one-world-order under Satan-Corion. Both groups used parts of the Corionic Cross. Then in 1964, Crynnwagg, as majordomo for Baron Torquay-Lambourgeau, founded the evil Novordo Club, which rules what some today call the new order.”
Finally, since it turned out the bones found near Holyhope were in fact the bones of Swami Negran, not the bones of Crynnwagg, the band leader asked this question which the ‘witch’ answered.
“But what’s this have to do with Negran?” Jack asked.
“Negran, of course, is Crynnwagg.”
To find out how Crynnwagg morphed into Negran and others throughout history, to find out how Negran really died, and to find more mystery in The Prodigal Band Trilogy, buy the book using links from the Bookstore here.
The Prodigal Band Trilogy © 2019 by Deborah Lagarde, Battle of the Band © 1996 by Deborah Lagarde, The Prophesied Band © 1998 by Deborah Lagarde and The Prodigal Band © 2018 by Deborah Lagarde. Permission needed to copy any materials off this page.
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