Psychological Thriller
Date Published: 03/25/2024
Publisher: Great Whale Books
The wedding was weeks away for two young lovers, who had counted themselves lucky to have found one another. Then, it was over, as one of them abruptly disappeared. Audrey was not abducted. Not exactly. She was not taken against her will. Rather, her will itself had been taken. Coerced and controlled. Deceived and derailed. Matthias cannot walk away from the catastrophe, though he has nothing to go on, and is in the dark beyond all personal darkness he has ever known . . .
The Contraption is a novel that deals with the challenges faced by a woman who has been recruited into a dangerous, coercive religious cult. Her fiancé is left not knowing even where she is. Her name has been changed and she has been relocated to another state. The cult, Church of the Mountain of Radiance, is an all-controlling psychological prison.
Excerpts from The Contraption, by Barton Allen Stewart
“Have you ever wondered what was special about all the great geniuses and special people of history? Was it genetics? No. They were simply able to align their minds with the great field of Spherules, and transition off into eternities of infinite radiance! Only with the emergence of the Beneficence, Earnest Seamark, fifty years ago, was there a real hope for the average person to align, and ascend. Why do you think we even have a consciousness, anyway?”
As unexpected and unreal as this shpiel was, there was something about the women themselves, especially the one who seemed to be in the lead. She believed it. The others did, too. And Audrey had not ever seen anything like their belief. Nor had she ever felt the warmth and depth of love these strangers had for her. So, what was the reality that drove their belief?
Standing alone with them in the empty park in muted morning light, a moment of the surreal took shape. It felt and looked like a scene from an old black-and-white arthouse movie.
Did Audrey want to try to align her mind with the boundless sea of the spheres?
Audrey did.
Sheer curiosity, as much as anything, launched her into what became multiple hours of subtle head movements. Mostly it was with eyes closed, sometimes facing the sun, other times face down. Alignment could be a matter of microns. The pineal gland behind the forehead and the medulla at the base of the brain stem had to form an equilateral triangle with one single Spherule in the array. Feel your way. The conjunction had to hold long enough that her consciousness recognized what was happening.
The tiny spheres could vary in size or spacing depending on location, and some other conditions, but on that morning, at that place, things were said to be especially promising. One of the ladies quickly aligned, and cooed and sang about the loveliness of it. Two of them eventually were in, but the third was dedicated to helping Audrey.
It was fatiguing beyond words, the precise positioning of her head. At more than one point she was sure she would fall over, or scream out – What in hell was this all about?! They kept talking to her, trying to help her find “it.”
She thought she saw a fuzzy, indistinct blob or ball in her mind’s eye.
“I think … I see something,” she said.
“Is it perfectly spherical?!” the leading lady wanted to know.
“It was. I don’t really see it anymore,” Audrey said.
“You were almost there,” she informed her . . .
. . . They had told her she would easily be able to deal with her various responsibilities while she studied Ascendant Scripture. They spoke of how she and Matthias should get married at a Mountain of Radiance center. But for now, she had to keep it all entirely quiet. She was so new to the understanding of MOR that she was not authorized to speak about it to others just yet. There could be some legal issues involved with doing so, too. Intellectual property and copyright considerations, they said. She didn’t understand what that could be. But anyway, just for the time being, they said, it was imperative to keep all of this to yourself.
She recalled having every intention of continuing on with her past affiliations. All of them. The marriage was still on. It had been a few days since she had spoken to Matt. But she had to get things all straightened out regarding the new paradigm of reality that had hit her like a floodlight in the face. After she came to a proper place to pause in her scriptural studies, she had planned on picking right back up with everyone. She had to have things together in her head so that she had something cogent, or at least coherent, to say to Matt and the family.
That had been the plan. But after myriad on-line study modules, all-day seminars at a hotel, the Spherule alignments, the group outreach sessions to higher-order sentient forms, and the three-day formal Adherency Inception ceremony in her white-draped bedroom, her previous life was finished. All of that was dead. True life, life in the light, began in a very big way.
Charles collected his papers, “Okay, now let me ask you one. I want to know your intentions regarding Audrey if you find her.” He got a little pointed about it, “… You find her. So, just what are you planning to do?”
Matt kept his cool, and said he just wanted to talk to her.
“Good. That’s good. Now, what are you going to say?”
He stammered, and Charles said, “Here’s a suggestion. You keep it very, very, very mellow! You smile a lot, but nothing big and phony-looking. You do not raise your voice. Ever. The most you can hope to accomplish is to counter what they have been telling her about you. Which would be something along the lines of – you hate her. You wanna kill her. You never loved her. All her family and friends hate her, too. Cults have to sever the person from all former attachments! And a big one, like a fiancé? Oh, hell yeah. What haven’t they pumped her head with concerning you? Then, there’s always the angel. The voice of her guardian angel says you’re no good. Okay, so if you get to talk to her, what you are going to do is plant a seed in her mind that they have been lying to her about you. About you, or about anything. Once the seedling of doubt starts to sprout, it can put a crack in all those walls they’ve built around her. Something in your favor is that she will start wanting out pretty soon.”
Her own commitment to the truth of the Shebbevunseh was rock solid and to-the-death, most of the time. But why did she feel so alone, when she never was alone? And what about this inner voice or presence that sometimes reared its head in a furious rebuke of the church? It felt almost like demonic possession, and was horrifying beyond words, not that she would ever dream of putting it into words. The internal impasse was agonizing, and she saw no way out. In the words of a gung-ho adherent she knew, the way out was up. Redouble your efforts for God.
Moments ago, she was informed that her timetable had been stepped up. She would be leaving for Florida before dawn in a van-load of Adherents, to depart on a ship for a yearlong mission to Brazil. She felt wistful on first hearing it, then as she considered what a big step it was, and how depleted her personal energy seemed to be, her mood was more like crestfallen.
A memory came to her spontaneously, as often they did in the rare moments when she was not kept busy. It was a visual of a double date. She and Matthias Pleasant and his sister Dee and her date Blaine were at a travelling carnival in the countryside near Fayetteville. There were colored lights and zany old music. They rode the Tilt-A-Whirl. Everyone was laughing. No glowering god was looking down on her, demanding obeisance. It was a time, just for the sake of itself. She would have it in her mind, to pull up and review whenever she needed to, for all the days of her life.
She knew they all hated her now, and there would never be any bringing them around to understanding her. Never would they understand the realities of the universe. There would be no making them see their downfallen position, and how to rise above. Though it was a waste of time, possibly evil, and certainly plainly to be seen by the ascendant entities who watched her mind, she could not help herself from wondering what those people were doing. What were they doing – right now? . . .
. . . After a deep pull on heavily sweetened iced tea, Bienville’s mellow voice emerged from the white cloud of his beard, “I think we can locate her.”
“Then it’s on,” Matthias said, “I do the heavy lifting, but all those helping me have my love.”
He looked from one to the other, and said, “Hands in on it!” slamming his palm down on the table. One at a time they all joined in. The hands of Charlie Bienville, Jin Kyong, Craig Moultrie, Deidra Pleasant, and Blaine Wheeler stacked atop his own, and made for a moment that moved his heart.
About the Author
The author, Barton A. Stewart, is a long time student of the cult phenomenon, and literary fiction. The Contraption marries together his two long time interests. Stewart has lived all over the United States, is presently single, and currently calls Metro Boston home. His book will be among the most realistic fictional depictions of the kinds of things that can happen in cases like this. Avoiding the sensationalism of so many novels on this subject, Stewart offers a look into another world, which unfortunately exists in the here and now.
Contact Links
Twitter: @BartStewart1
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