Page 111 of Forged in Deception

“Can you at least tell me about this ritual?” he asked, letting his voice take on its usual, more lighthearted tone. Lily ignored his plea, but to his relief, Cora nodded.

“Well, you’ve probably heard about our community on the news,” she started. “Though it’s not quite as big as everyone on Facebook is saying. I’ve only just joined, but it’s been around for a while now.”

He wanted to let her keep talking, but he wasn’t surprised that Karlin was unwilling to tamper her own curiosity any longer.

“How long? How did it start?” Karlin prodded.

“It was founded by a brilliant man. His name is Dr. Peter Rorhart, but we all call him the Professor.”

“Do not speak of someone you’ve never met,” Lily snapped. “I knew him intimately. He was a world expert on the history of the Texas panhandle, with a special knowledge of the Antelope Creek phase Indians. But the academy shunned his ideas.”

Asher shot Karlin a glance. He remembered Cora had told Karlin something about some Indian tribe that had supposedly gone missing. Was this the same one?

“What do you mean?” he pressed, glad that Lily was starting to talk after all. By the sounds of it, she knew a lot more about the cult than the younger woman did.

“The Professor was willing to follow the evidence where others would not,” Lily said proudly. “This tribe disappeared almost six hundred years ago. The mainstream wisdom is thatthey left their settlements due to drought, resource exhaustion, or being driven out by the Apache, but that’s not where the evidence leads.”

Karlin raised an eyebrow. “If my memory serves me, you yourself said that their disappearance was down to mundane, earthly causes.”

“I couldn’t exactly tell you what I really thought, could I?” she sneered.

“So you and this Professor actually think these people were abducted by aliens?”

Asher couldn’t blame Karlin for pushing. The whole thing sounded completely insane, and yet, after everything he’d witnessed tonight, there was little he would doubt.

Lily scoffed. “Hardly. They weresavedfrom imminent extinction by benevolent, interdimensional beings. They contacted them through their traditional plants–”

“Psychedelics?” Asher clarified.

Lily nodded.

“–and eventually, the tribe was brought to a new planet, where they could live in peace.”

“Now your community is seeking the same contact? Seeking to leave this world for a better one?” Asher asked.

It was Cora who answered this time, and Lily made no effort to stop her. “Primarily, our goal is to serve Mother, but yes, in the end, we know that our final home is not here on Earth.”

“Mother?” Asher asked, looking over at Karlin, who looked just as confused as he was. “Who’s Mother?”

“She’s our everything,” Cora said dreamily, as though she were a teenager talking about a pop star she was madly in love with. “She’s going to save us from extinction, just as she saved the Antelope Creek peoples hundreds of years ago. She has a whole new planet, waiting just for us.”

Asher opened his mouth, trying to think of some clarifying question, but it seemed both he and Karlin had been rendered momentarily speechless.

Cora went on.

“Lily doesn’t need the drugs to talk to Mother, but the rest of us do. Ayahuasca is pretty good, but DX8 works the best of all. It’s a miracle potion, Ms. McKenna. You should be proud of your work in helping to bring it into the world.”

Karlin looked horrified, but a second later, her brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Wait a second. You’ve been stealing DX8 from my lab, haven't you?”

Cora looked nervous, but Lily’s mouth curved into a cruel smile.

“This retreat was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Not when I knew that the formula for DX8 would have only gotten better since the last time I came and stocked up. Meeting Cora was an extra gift.”

Karlin looked like she was going to either throw up or throw punches. Maybe both.

“I still don’t understand. Who, exactly, is this Mother person?” Asher cut in quickly.

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