Mastim's Curse

Chapter 8

Days pass, and the atmosphere around the house gets back to normal, at least normal for us. I stay in my room as much as possible pretending to study, Jaidee gets back to teaching her Kuk Sool class, and dad keeps polishing his latest car. He must have polished it a hundred times by now. He's so excited about this sale.

I toss my Calculus book to the floor, too bored to study. My laptop calls to me for a diversion and soon I'm looking over the latest news. The headlines are about several prisoners escaping over the past few days. The similarity in the escapes seems strange. They all had help from the outside and most of them are known stalkers.

One of the escapees, Kyle Harper, is a supper creepy man. According to this, he broke into a house and forced the home owner to watch as he raped his wife and daughter. Then he killed the poor guy. How sick. Not only that, he's a stalker too. After he was convicted and put in prison, he started sending Aleale love letters. Wow. Getting love letters from that guy would sure give you the willies. I bet she's not happy about him being out of prison.

Also there's been a spike in missing persons and kidnappings all over the country. One article talks about the president of John Bacon's fan club disappearing while on vacation in Mexico. I'm not surprised. Mexico is so dangerous these days. Not someplace I'd go on vacation unless I wanted to do a lot of killing, which I don't. I'm done with that, forever.

All of that, plus a riot in Denver protesting police brutality, makes it look like things are falling apart all over. A cult calling themselves the 'Order' has popped up in a couple of cites saying this is the start of the second coming. How retarded. They're going to be very disappointed when the world doesn't end.

That reminds me. I'm curious about what that cop said about my name meaning adversary in Hebrew. I've never seen that reference. Maybe if I search for my name, the world 'adversary', and Hebrew. That works and brings up a lot of references to someone named Mastema, which means adversary. This must be what he's talking about. There are lots of articles about this Mastema and the Book of Jubilees which is some kind of religious writing. Oh, now I see, it's one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I've heard of those. That's interesting. Maybe we're named after this Mastema guy. He must have been very important because he was a prince. There's a part here about demons that's odd:

"When Mastema, the leader of the spirits, came, he said: 'Lord creator, leave some of them before me; let them listen to me and do everything that I tell them, because if none of them is left for me I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among mankind. For they are meant for (the purposes of) destroying and misleading before my punishment because the evil of mankind is great.' Then he said that a tenth of them should be left before him, while he would make nine parts descend to the place of judgment."

- Jubilees 10:8-9

So it seems we're named after the prince of spirits. That's kind of cool. However, more reading reveals that he uses these spirits to lead people astray just to show God how weak and evil man is. That's not so cool.

"And the prince Mastema exerted himself to do all this, and he sent forth other spirits, those which were put under his hand, to do all manner of wrong and sin, and all manner of transgression, to corrupt and destroy, and to shed blood upon the earth."

- Jubilees 11:4

Suddenly I don't like this Mastema guy so much. If we go to Germany to visit family like dad wants, I'm going to find out more about our family history and what we have to do with this Prince Mastema.

***

I'm trying to make the tires on the new car shine just a little more when I get a text from my buyer. This is a little unusual. It says Aleale wants her car delivered to her at the Stables Center before her concert this Friday night. They're even giving me three VIP passes to the concert so I can take Jaidee and Nicole to the show. That was nice of then. Nicole's going to love it. She's a huge Aleale fan. They're going to flip when they find out. I can't wait any longer. It's time to tell them.