Chapter 1: Something's Happening

http://pbpfinc.org/tag/brandywine-valley-ghosts-haunts-of-southeastern-pennsylvania/

    "I arise, facing East" chants Karma Czarcinski into the dawn fog of the Annandale woods surrounding the Emaus Clinic. "I am asking toward the light..."

"Stop right there" commands a tall man with a dark handle-bar mustache standing over the young woman sitting cross legged on the wet grass. "We don't use AMOLC prayers in the FLC."

"Isn't prayer prayer?" Karma asks, her long autumn hair and sandalwood beads swishing as she swivels her head toward him.

"Well yes pretty lady, but not when it's the blasphemous verse of the so-called Ancient and Mystical Order Lilia Croesis" he stammers, hideous whiskers swaying with his shaking head.

__________

    Karma had just returned east after a long stint in the Bay Area. After dropping out of high school in central New Jersey, she'd dropped in to the hippies in 1968 Berkeley, the yippies in Chicago for the ill-fated Democratic Convention, and the commuters at San Fran State, where she'd gotten her GED along with a BA in the first class of the new program in ethnic studies. Now she was back in her original hometown to help care for her mother's ailing sister, and Bound Brook was just thirty miles east but at least a few centuries away from the Hunterdon County religious sect she'd just stumbled into.

__________

     "It's not just beauty that's in the eyes of the beholder" Karma counters, turning back to the shrouded forest and hoping the conversation has ended.

"Whatever do you mean, my new friend?" smiles the lanky man with intense dark eyes behind horn rimmed glasses. "And what brings such a delightful creature to the grounds of Fraternitas Lilia Croesis on a foggy late summer morning?" 

"I brought my aunt to see Dr. Honaker" she answers, standing straight up from a lotus pose  turning to face him eye-to-chest.

"Uh, well, I'd better get over to the clinic" he stammers, turning tail and stumbling away before calling back over his shoulder "but come see me at Waverly Hall!"