Mt. Athos
Mount Athos is known as “The Sacred Mountain”. It is on a mountainous peninsula located in Northern Greece. Technically, Mt. Athos is an Autonomous Monastic Republic” close to the Macedonia region.
There are twenty Orthodox Christian monasteries located there. The biggest is Saint Panteleimon Monastery, named after the nationally revered Russian Saint. The monastic community is known colloquially as “The Rossikon”. Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin visited the establishment in 2012 and Russia continues to provide generous support for its facilities and spiritual mission.
The monastery occupies the plateau of one of the highest mountains on the Mt. Athos Peninsula and only males are allowed to enter. A special permit is needed, called a “Diamonitirion”, to pass through its formidable gates. Only His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople in consultation with Patriarch Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus can grant a Diamonitirion.
Heinlen and his male Nurse, Andrjy, were granted this privilege. Now, half of his day is dedicated to physical rehabilitation, and the other half is devoted to prayer and study.
He’s undergone Parietal Lobe surgery. Doctors opened his head and carved a blood clot out of his brain. Heinlen needs vigorous physical therapy and spatial-relations exercises to retrain the damaged portion of his brain that controls hand-eye coordination and nerve responses. His speech is slurred and he suffers from motor function deficits. Example?
Heinlen’s right arm is not as cooperative as it used to be. He drops things and has problems holding a fork. His left leg is numb. He can’t sleep a full eight hours – and tosses and turns most nights suffering flashbacks of things that he can’t remember happened in the first place.
Then there’s the headaches. Not just where they screwed brackets into his skull to anchor his bone flap, but throbbing, dizzying bursts of pain that synchronize with his pulse. Nauseating bouts of stomach acid, burning the back of his throat and causing dry heaves. He’s dizzied most days – and grabs on to walls constantly to steady himself. And his condition isn’t getting much better. In fact, he’s dragging his left foot even more by the looks of his shoe. Wear marks don’t lie.
At least his hair is growing back.
There are 58 stairs that lead to where he sleeps – an unfurnished, stone room built about 600 years ago. The daily climb is part of his physical therapy. There’s no toilet. A monk removes his wooden bucket every few hours and replaces it with a clean one. He has a small writing desk with a built-in stand to support books and one cane-back chair. He washes after his workouts.
Heinlen’s nurse, Andrjy, is an Orthodox Novitiate as well as a licensed physical therapist, ex-medic in the Serbian Army and black belt (Master Sash) in Kung fu. The Monastery has a state-of-the-art Gymnasium (with showers) and a small medical facility. Russian State “visitors” oversee security and maintain constant contact with the FSB – the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.
Life at Saint Panteleimon Monastery is hard for a young, healthy man. For someone recuperating from Parietal Hematoma Surgery, it’s downright punishing. Heinlen’s broke-down condition makes his every task and movement a challenge. The place has stairs everywhere. Food is sparse. Alcohol is forbidden. Entertainment is nonexistent. He is expected to study – and exercise. That’s it. It’s miserable.
Everybody speaks Russian. Andrjy helps him along – but Heinlen is expected to develop basic conversational skills in the language and his progress is abysmal. Between his difficulty communicating, his physical challenges and general exhaustion, Heinlen scraping the bottom of his barrel for strength. He feels like the only Special Needs child in the school.
He finds his only solace in prayer – inside the Monastery’s “Katholikon” – or main church, built in 1812, also known as the “Old Russik”. It’s old, worn pews and walls stained with years of burned candle wax almost cradle his soul. The majestic icons take him back to his childhood when his mother would take him to Liturgy every Sunday. The sweet smells of incense and spirits of pious souls make it a refuge for him. Old Russik is his favorite place to pray and contemplate his future. It gives him hope.
Andrjy is pleased with Heinlen’s scar healing – but unhappy with his physical weakness and still-compromised ambulatory abilities. Heinlen’s numerous Russian language faux pas cause his male Nurse visible embarrassment. But Andrjy has bottomless patience, for which Heinlen is grateful.
When’s this all going to be over? Is he always going to be some kind of cripple? The questions bring him to tears. If only he could hold a fork again and walk without scraping his shoe sideways. He knows he’s not making much headway. Before he left Clinique de Lavoisier in Switzerland, his Chief Neurosurgeon, Dr. Alicia Brabenfeld, told him that his hematoma was “profound” and that he was the “luckiest man in the world”.
Heinlen would go back to his old life as a Warren cop in a heartbeat if he could – with his old badge and old body. Simon Magus’ wealth isn’t worth it. This is all one big gift horse he wishes he would’ve punched in the mouth that day when he first learned about The Magician’s Will. The Mission he aspires to is becoming more and more of an elusive dream.
His stay is indeterminate – but at least he trusts his doctor. Because women are prohibited in the Saint Panteleimon Monastery, Dr. Marina Vorshilovka examines him every week at an off-site clinic near Mt. Athos. She helicopters in every Friday from Cyprus. It’s her weekly house-call. A monk takes Heinlen there on one of the many mule-carts the Monastery uses to get supplies. He can’t believe it. A mule cart…
What’s Dr. Vorshilovka’s verdict? When can Heinlen leave this place? Six months – give or take.
Heinlen knows in his heart that she’s giving an optimistic estimate to keep his spirits up. He’s a wreck – mentally and physically. He prays to Archangel Gabriel every day to give him strength, to heal his broken body. But no matter how many hours he spends in prayer and contemplation, Gabriel doesn’t speak to him. He struggles to have faith.
But he’s never felt this kind of despair. He’s never felt this kind of loneliness. He tries mightily to hide it, but he knows his mask is slipping.
Heinlen feels like he’s in a hole – and he can’t stop digging.
Chatsworth Mayhem
Leeds could’ve walked to this crime scene from her house in Tabernacle in about fifteen minutes if she took couple of vacant-lot shortcuts. Floyd Beesom’s house in Tabernacle is on the Chatsworth Township line, no more than a football field’s length from an old collapsed dock on Reeds Branch of the Rancocas River where she used to drink beer with her juvenile delinquent friends when she was a teenager.
She ran with a rough crowd back then. She’d regularly cut school and hang out with some bikers and their girlfriends at “The Dock”, where they’d chug cans of cheap Yuengling lager and Miller High Life and smoke weed until two or three hours before dawn.
The irony of it all is delicious.
Now she has a PhD in Anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia, PA and a Gold Detective’s Shield from the New Jersey State Police. She smiles and recalls that Grateful Dead line from their song, Truckin‘: “…what a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Those were the days – back when she didn’t know why her eyes did the vertical pupils thing. Why she could see perfectly in the dark when everybody else fell on their face. Why she so easily beat the sheit out of one of those biker Dudes she drank beer with who’d gotten a little “handsy” when she was seventeen. The days when she didn’t know what she really was…
Back when she was a Virgin.
And then – late in the game – Heinlen relieved her of that burden. And the asshole never even knew it. He was so loaded on Scotch he thought she was menstruating. He acted like such Dickhead, she never told him that he’d taken her precious innocence. He still didn’t know. He just took for granted she’d been “around the block” because she was so rough at the edges. And her language – well…she never was exactly demure. She was what those old fifties Film Noir classic police movies called “a tough broad.” Maybe that’s why Heinlen thought she was already broken in.
What was the old male chauvinist expression? “Never miss a slice off a cut loaf”.
But why was she going down this memory hole while she was driving to a murder crime scene? Why was she thinking of Heinlen?
Because something was wrong. He was in trouble – and she knew it. She felt it. He needed her help – but the selfish Son of a Bitch was too proud to ask for it. He was too obsessed with his Mission.
As she parked her Police cruiser in the gaggle of blazing strobe lights that made Floyd Beesom‘s ramshackle home on 667 Tabernacle Road look like an airport runway, it dawned on her –
Peter Xiang-Li! Heinlen’s lawyer! He’d know where Heinlen was – and why he wasn’t answering his phone!
She makes a big red mental note to call the lawyer later as she ducks her way through the yellow police tape cordon that defines the crime scene. She know right off the hop she’s at the right place. It smells like a sewage treatment facility.
Leeds had seen this kind of mayhem before – on her stints with Heinlen on Simon Magus’ Vampyre assignments in Europe. Whatever happened here involved slaughtering and dismembering three human beings and feasting on them until all that remained was a pile of carcasses, heads with their brains sucked out, gnawed on bones and chewed organ meat. It was a stinking, fly-infested, putrescent cesspit of gore.
The Burlington County Medical Examiner, Robert Freece, MD, is already on the scene, collecting samples and boots-deep into shredded human remains. He just looks at her and shrugs with a flummoxed look on his face. His words seethe with frustration.
“Where the Hell do I start? I don’t what belongs to whom here. I think there was three victims….”
The scene screams out unleashed anger – blind, feeding-frenzy rage. Whatever did this was physically sick and out of its mind – perhaps aware that it was dying. Sating its hunger was its only primal, atavistic drive. Leeds wouldn’t be surprised if they found the thing dead somewhere deep in the Pine Barrens, collapsed and self-annihilated by its own fatal disease.
Although she won’t write it into her NJ State Police Report, she’s sure this was KURU. Her theory is simple – there’s a coven of KURU-infected Vampyres somewhere in the Pine Barrens that partook in Dame Frederica Goode’s Satanism rituals in Chatsworth – probably as honored guests – and gorged themselves on abducted girls. One of the girls was from the family that contracted KURU in their former home in Papua, New Guinea and worked as domestics in Philadelphia. That’s how the Vampyres contracted KURU.
KURU apparently had the same a fatal effect on Vampyres that it did on humans. It’s a virus that infects Vampyre anatomy like the co-called “Vampyre Disease” that triggers in them Heme Deficiencies so severe that Vampyre Blood can’t capture or deliver oxygen to their cells. The medical term was Viral Erythro Proto Porphyria or VEPP. Vampyres aren’t immortal – on the contrary, they get sick, get old and die. If KURU can be weaponized against Vampyres, Heinlen might have a new and deadly defense weapon at his fingertips to protect humanity.
Leeds calls Peter Xiang-Li, Heinlen’s lawyer, the minute she gets back to the NJ State Police Barracks in Bordentown. It’s not the easiest conversation she’s ever had with him. Peter Xiang-Li, does his best to flex his “Attorney at Law” muscles – which doesn’t impress Leeds at all. Finally, she drops all attempts at civility.
LEEDS: “Look – my question is simple. Where is Heinlen? You gonna’ tell me or am I gonna’ drive up to your office and beat the piss outta’ your scrawny Chinese ass?”
XAING-LI: “Don’t threaten me. Your Nazi State Police attitude doesn’t exactly make me wann’a cooperate here… Now why do you want to know where Heinlen is?”
LEEDS (YELLING): “BECAUSE I WANT TO PUNCH HIM IN THE DICK”.
XIANG-LI: “I can’t tell you anything. Everything I know about Heinlen is protected by Attorney-Client privilege. And if you’re threatening to do him physical violence, I won’t help you at all.”
LEEDS: “Alright, then. Let’s start over. Will you answer my questions with yes or no responses? How ’bout we begin with – Did you sell off Simon Magus’ beach compound in Cyprus?”
XIANG-LI: “OK – yes or no responses only. My first answer – about Cyprus – is “No.”
LEEDS: “Is Heinlen hurt?”
XIANG-LI (pausing): “Yes.”
LEEDS: “Is he in a hospital?”
XIANG-LI (tentatively): “No…”
LEEDS: “Is he under medical care?”
XIANG-LI: (pausing): “Yes…”
LEEDS: “The last time you spoke to him, did he ask about me?”
XIANG-LI (definitively): “Yes”.
LEEDS: “Is he in capable hands?”
XIANG-LI (a long pause): “Yes…”
LEEDS: “Do you fear for him?”
XIANG-LI (immediately): “Yes!”
Leeds doesn’t push her luck. She’s been a cop too long to wrestle with lawyers. She thanks Peter Xiang-Li and hangs up. Between her gut radar and intuition, she has her answers. She walks directly into her supervisor’s office and books-off three weeks medical leave.
She heads home to Tabernacle early after making some hectic Internet transactions. There are no direct flights from Philadelphia to Cyprus; she’s going to have to catch a connecting flight from London, England. The whole trip – Philly to Larnaca, Cyprus will take about 15 hours. That’s IF she makes her connection at Heathrow in London. And it ain’t a cheap journey.
But she’s not about to let Heinlen face trouble – or danger – alone. He may be a selfish Son of a Bitch – but he’s HER selfish Son of a Bitch. And it’s about time he knows it.
Jersey Girls are built that way. They’re loyal and they protect what’s theirs. Especially Piney girls.
*NO PART OF THIS WORK PRODUCT IS AI
Copyright, 2026 – Jon & Jedediah Croft
www.bogironfoundry.com
Email: vlchek1@gmail.com
