Staretz Encounter
A New Age Thriller
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
MODERN TIMES
New York City
The rhythmic clang thwacked his slumbering brain,
jostling the man into a semi-awakened state. Groping the darkness, past the
alarm clock, his hand settled on the telephone, which rattled in its cradle
until he fumbled it to his ear.
“Rudy, are you OK?” A voice sounded uneasy on the
other side of the line.
He blinked at the red clock numbers as they came
into focus: 5:42. “Chess, is that you?” Stunned, he sat there trying to clear
the cobwebs. “One second, babe, give me one second.” Why had his girlfriend called at such an ungodly hour?
“I’m so glad you’re there. I just had this terrible
dream that you were run down by a creepy grocery van. I’m so relieved you’re
all right. It seemed so real....Is Vermont still on for the weekend?”
“Are you kidding, absolutely not. Our relationship
is over.”
“Great, it will be good to get away. Be careful
today, hon.” Chessie hung up the phone with a smile. She was looking forward to
their getaway.
Rolling out of bed, waking man stumbled into the
bathroom to adjust the shower. It was another work day, a Tuesday to be exact.
As he waited for the dribbling water to slowly warm, he listened to the
occasional truck clatter over a patch of cobblestone which lay at the base of
his building. Gazing up, the 34-year-old man stared at yet another
irrepressible roach scamper along the top of the tile, a quarter inch from the
ceiling. “Jeeze,” he mumbled, as he grabbed the back end of a razor, and stood
upon the toilet seat to crush the bastard vermin. Disgusted, he reached for a
Kleenex to scoop up the slimy mess and flush it down. He pushed aside the
plastic curtain to step gingerly into the still cool spray. God, he hated the
plumbing in this place, he thought, as he washed away the night and thought about
Chessie’s odd call.
Grabbing yesterday’s towel, Rudy turned the radio on
to listen to the news. Something about jazz and an Alaskan airplane crash and
two dead congressmen. He heard no more, as he stopped quickly to fix some stale
toast and reheated coffee as still in a daze he gazed drearily into the murky
gray which clung like a cape over the predawn skyline; and before he knew it,
the metropolitan reporter was down the stairs and outside, dodging a yellow cab
to cross the street to catch the downtown local. Rudy waved hello to Carl, the
grocery man’s son, who was just emerging from his bright white delivery truck,
when suddenly the rattle of dull green-paneled van could be gleaned screaming
dizzily down the shiny cobblestones. Rudy caught Carl’s eye turn to horror.
Brakes jammed as the delinquent van skidded before impact. Carl’s body lay
smashed, sandwiched between the two now silent vehicles, his package of
groceries scattered, the dreams of his father shattered.
TAJIKISTAN
Two Years Ago
High in the Hindu Kush, along the Baroghil Pass, Chi
Jhenghis enjoyed milking his father’s shaggy yak herd in 50° below zero
weather. Even as a small child he had loved the extreme cold, the smell of
frozen shrubs, the crisp lingering echoes and stinging shivers of chilled
winds. Alone in the frozen crystal barn, the Tajik youth rhythmically tugged on
the animal’s firm pink teats as whitish gray fluid squirted into his rusted
metal pail. Concentrating on his job, Chi did not hear the snow-crunching
footsteps approach until his eye caught the long shadow growing under the
barn’s wooden saloon doors. They swung open as he heard his grandfather’s
voice.
“Chi,” grandpa said, “hurry up, or you’ll miss your
mother’s blood pudding!” The old farmer’s head remained in shadow as the
backlit sun cast yellow shafts through his rugged woolen-hooded parker. He
smiled deeply, his 80-year-old eyelashes glistening with melted snowflakes in
the dawn light; the breath of each word hovered in misty rainbows as grandpa
moved forward in a steady bowlegged flow.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Both men froze as the
shrieking scream of a lone timber wolf pierced the air. There had been reports
of six villagers missing within the last three weeks. Many of the old women
blamed it on animal spirits; but the old man sensed a different presence. A
descendant of Genghis Khan, who ruled the region in the 13th
century, the elderly Mongolian could smell the evil of deeper danger, human head hunters, modern technological
warriors who had overrun his country these past score years.
“Chi,” he said, his manner changing as swiftly as
the wind, “prepare for the shadow of our Great One. Hurry along before your
pudding turns to ice.” He grabbed the youngster by the protective collar and
huddled him back to the house.
Chi’s mother, father, two brothers and four sisters
had already started nibbling dried strips of squirrel meat as he and grandpa
entered the warm kitchen. Father added more coal to the cast iron stove.
“Burrr,” Mother Jhenghis said. “Close
that door and bring yak’s milk here. You must have our cool blood pudding son,
before hot potato soup. We don’t want your teeth to cold crack from the bite of
winter’s chill.” She smiled broadly revealing a full set of saw-toothed
incisors. The children giggled gleefully.
Mother Jhenghis reached into their live food cage and grabbed a squirming squirrel firmly by the scruff of its neck. As
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
Delving into the
labyrinthine quagmire known as the paranormal, Staretz Encounter is the story
about news reporter, Rudy Styne, from New York City, and his Eurasian
counterpart, Dr. Imo Bern, a neuroscientist from a secret parapsychology laboratory
in Siberia. The Soviet Union has collapsed, Eurasia is in turmoil. A right-wing
extremist, Petar Bonzovalivitch, has come to the fore. Marshalling a cadre of
psionic soldiers whose brains have been rewired, Bonzovalivitch launches a
clandestine operation to topple the West and restore the empire that was once
Russia. His head of psi-ops is black magician Dr. Georgi Boshtov, ex-KGB agent
and grand-nephew of Gregori Rasputin. Their target for capture is Egyptian
superpsychic Abdullah Manu.
A controversial
celebrity, Manu's psychic feats have splintered the scientific community. From
the point of the view of the media, Manu is passed off as a charlatan, and the
parapsychologists who study him, like NYU physics professor Jay Ketchembach,
are billed as pseudoscientists.
Rudy Styne,
reporter for Modern Times, wakes up one morning to a foreboding dream which
comes true later in the day. Having never had a psychic experience before, the
reporter decides to research the topic for an article for the magazine. At the
same time, he also begins to uncover Petar Bonzovalivitch's nefarious plan and
also interview Professor Ketchembach and Abdullah Manu. Eventually, Rudy and
his girlfriend, Chessie Barnsworth, meet up with heartsick scientist, Imo Bern,
at an international conference on psychotronics. Bern, who was performing the
brain operations necessary for the creation of the legion of human cyborgs,
tries to defect and pass his knowledge to the West as Rudy attempts to persuade
an all too skeptical news community that Bonzovalivitch is more than an
outrageous buffoon.
As the story
progresses, Rudy visits psychic researchers and an avatar in search for
ultimate truths, only to return to New York to find his local guru, Professor
Ketchembach, murdered. Georgi Boshtov and his cybernetic goon squad are on the
loose. They kidnap Chessie and also capture Rudy and Abdullah Manu. The climax
pits superpsychic Abdullah Manu against the evil occultist Georgi Boshtov in an
allogorical battle which recapitulates the eternal struggle between light and
dark forces for control of the planet.
In the genre of
the Stephen King novels and such movies, television shows and books as The 6th
Sense, Martrix, The Green Mile, Powder, The Fury, Lawnmower Man, X-Files,
X-Men, The Exorcist and Celestine Prophecy, STARETZ ENCOUNTER is a New Age trek
through a paradigm-shifting world where telepathy and telekinesis are more than
arcane possibilities.
About the Author
Editor of
MetaScience, A New Age Journal on Consciousness, Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D., has
taught courses on psychology and consciousness research at such institutions as
Providence College and the University of Rhode Island for over 25 years. Having
worked with and interviewed a number of the world's greatest living psychics
including Dean Kraft, Ingo Swann, Matthew Manning and Uri Geller, Dr. Seifer is
also a science writer. With more than 70 publications in periodicals such as
Wired, Cerebrum, Hands on Electronics, Parapsychology Review, Journal of
Psychohistory, Lawyer's Weekly and Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Dr.
Seifer is an internationally recognized authority on the inventor Nikola Tesla
and also as a handwriting expert. Featured in The Economist, Rhode Island
Monthly, Glamour and Cosmopolitan and on TV on the History Channel and
Associated Press Television News for his work in graphology, and in Scientific
American, New York Times, Nature, Library Journal and The Washington Post for
his work on Tesla, he has lectured at such institutions as the United Nations,
Cambridge University, Oxford University, University of Vancouver, City College
of New York, Long Island University, Brandeis University, New York Public
Library, Colorado College, Cranbrook Retreat, LucasFilms Industrial Light &
Magic and West Point Military Academy, as well as in Boston, Chicago, Colorado
Springs, Denver, Detroit, Providence, New York, Santa Fe, Jerusalem, Haifa and
Zagreb. His lecture on the topic "Precognition, Synchronicity and the
Structure of Time" was given as a poster session at the "Towards a
Science of Consciousness" symposium which was held in Tuscon in April 1996
and at the University of Rhode Island in 2001.
Listings include Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in Science and
Engineering, Marquis' editions.
His latest work
WIZARD: THE LIFE & TIMES OF NIKOLA TESLA (Citadel Press) was boxed and
starred by Publisher's Weekly, featured in a three-page review in Scientific
American as "a serious piece of scholarship," high-lighted as a
full-page article in the New York Times Long Island section, recommended for
"all levels" by Choice and "highly recommended" by the
American Association for the Advancement of Science. Other works include THE
BIG FRAME (true life courtroom thriller), THE LOST WIZARD (screenplay and video
docu-drama), THE MAN WHO HARNESSED NIAGARA FALLS (young adult's primer, also
translated into Polish), SELF & PSYCHE (psychology text, work in progress)
and HAIL TO THE CHIEF (screenplay).
With a B.S. from
the University of Rhode Island, five semesters of graphology at the New School
For Social Research, photography at the School of Visual Arts, an M.A. from the
University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute, Dr. Seifer works as
a handwriting expert and testifies in court. He presently teaches psychology at
Roger Williams University.
Proposal for
Staretz Encounter/Seifer