Russell Twyce

Short Social Commentary Fiction

The Mad Trapper’s Ghost is also on Scribd.

Some people might be disturbed by this story – so be warned.  Others might see what I’m really trying to say.  ‘Humanity has a bright future ahead that we can find only after we look critically and honestly at our past and present mistakes.’

There is MORE to Conversational Hypnosis that you CAN Realize

The Mad Trapper’s Ghost – Part One
By Russell Twyce

The snow blew in small white tornados that buffeted his stalled car.  The outside temperature was not so low that he would in immanent danger of freezing to death, but his job prospects in this devastated economy were now an icicle that wouldn’t soon melt.  The very last of his money had gone into his gas tank to drive him out to the work site – that was wasted cash now.

“Why me?’  Donald asked the blizzard.  “What have I ever done wrong?”

None of his actions had merited the hard times he had descended into.  The global economic situation dictated and the population suffered accordingly.

“Now what?”  He observed the small drifts already starting to build up on his car.  If the snow kept up as it was now, the whole vehicle might be buried in a few hours.

“Now,” a voice spoke from the passenger seat, “we can go to my place.”

“What the hell!”  Donald swiveled to his right in shock, and his astonishment then magnified exponentially at the sight of a fur-clad man seated suddenly beside him.

“I’ve been to Hell quite a few times,” the solid-seeming ghost said matter-of-factly, “and I don’t find it nearly as bad as some folks make purgatory out to be.  But this is one Hell of a winter storm out here.  So why don’t we relocate to my cabin?”

“Will I find my car again?”

“What does it matter even if a truck hits it under a pile of snow?”  The trapper said as he exited the car.

“The motor is as dead as you will be if you continue to sit in it.”

“Who are you?”  The stranded and unemployed motorist asked as he trudged along in the ethereal woodsman’s footsteps.

“I suppose that you could call me Albert Johnson.”  The mad trapper offered over his shoulder, and the words seemed to swirl the snow with a chill wind from Hell.  “I’ve had a number of names over the many years.”

‘Albert Johnson?’  Donald wracked his brain for how he knew that name.  It was familiar but the mental snows of time and events had drifted over the snippet.

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The small log cabin was snug and well chinked against the raging blizzard outside.
After brushing the snow from his clothing, Albert had busied himself in fixing two mugs of steaming cocoa.  The confused guest had stripped off his outer clothes and taken a seat next to the hearth.

The only ‘Albert Johnson’ I knew of,” Donald said after his first sip of the soothing beverage, “was also known as the ‘Mad Trapper of Rat River’.  He killed one RCMP officer in the high Canadian Arctic, wounded another policeman and then was shot after leading the cops and trackers on an exciting manhunt.  But that was way back in the 1930’s.”

“It was 1931.”

“If that was you,” Donald said in mocking disbelief, ‘then you were shot 9 times and your grave is in Aklavic in the Canadian Northwest Territory.”

“That was neither the first time I was dead, nor the last.”  The unusual trapper lifted his shirt to point at several bullet scars.  “This one finally finished Albert Johnson.”  He appeared to be of about 30 years old: that was about the age of his bemused guest.  “I was born in 1330 and my name was Nicholas Flamel.”

“You were purported to have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone.”

“Apparently,” the man smiled ironically, “those rumors are accurate.”

“You don’t sound like you’re French.”

“An accent tends to fade after a couple of hundred years.”  The one time scrivener and alchemist joked.

“But we’re not here to recount my life or rather, my many lives.  I’m with you to discuss your fate.”

“What do you know about me?”  Donald asked.

“I know enough to have prepared this cabin well in advance of your becoming stuck in a stalled vehicle here.  I’m aware of both your current situation and the straights that brought you to this life juncture.”

“How could you possibly have known that my car would break down just there?”

“The philosopher’s stone grants me the ability to peruse the Akashic Records.  Those unearthly books contain the history of the world as seen through the eyes of those who witnessed and participated in the actual events.”

Click Here to Read the Akashic Records

“Why me?”  Donald repeated the question he had asked himself in his car.  “I’m just a simple nobody.”

“Nobody is a nobody.  What you are is a victim.  The movers and shakers have rolled over your life’s prospects with utter disregard for you – or for anything but their own enrichment.  According to the Akashic Records, your existence could have ended right there on your lonely road, in the middle of nowhere.”

“Until you intervened.  Now I have a second chance.”

“That’s complicated and if I spent the next hundred years explaining it, you still wouldn’t completely understand.  But I’ll touch on the high points while we have supper.” Albert Johnson finished the dregs of his cocoa and then began to prepare a meal of rabbit stew.  He talked as he worked.  “Think of the Akashic Record of one person’s life being as a yarn.  Where time has gone from the present into the past, the record is as a solid thread but where it remains in the future, it is as frayed end fibers, each of which is a ‘could be’.  As a life progresses, those ‘could be’ possibilities dwindle as real events preclude them.  And at the point where your Akashic thread intersects mine, there are not many alternates left to you.”

“I kinda knew that before I met you.”  Donald said dejectedly.  “That job was about my last option before committing suicide.”

“Let’s talk about that job.”  Albert continued.  “Why did the company compel you to travel out to the job site on your own resources?”

“To cut costs.”

“So to save a few measly bucks, the prospective employer endangered your life in making you drive out into a wildly remote area, in a vehicle not up to the duty.”

“That car is all I had left.  Well, besides debt.”  Donald sheepishly admitted.  “I have more than enough debt to spare.”

“And you came to this debt because?”  Albert urged.

“The companies I owed the money to didn’t seem to understand that the world is in a recession.  The interest rates just went higher and higher as I defaulted on a few payments.  My last job was minimum wage and after tax, it was almost nothing.”

“What caused this economic melt-down?”

“I’ve heard it was something about sub-prime mortgages.”

“But that is nonsense.”  Albert dipped his spoon into the bubbling stew and then offered it to his guest, for a taste.  “I understand the real situation differently, and I do have the absolute truth in the Akashic Records to consult.”

“Very good.”  Donald nodded appreciatively at the flavor and his comment also had a lilt that asked the 700-year-old trapper to continue.

“Oil is a basic commodity.  And the price of a commodity should be set on; supply, demand, cost of production, and profit margin.”

“Yes.”

“But now we toss in the Chicago Commodity Futures Market.  With that going, the price is established on; supply, demand, cost of production, profit margin AND the contents of a crystal ball.”

“Futures contracts allow companies that use commodities to preplan their costs.”  Donald had learned that in school.

“Futures trading just adds some extra price gouging possibilities and it provides a glorified means of gambling for well-heeled investors.  When have you ever seen a cereal manufacturer lowering their product price on the strength of having bought grain at a better future price?”

“Never.”

“Yet the same corporation will up the price in a heartbeat, if the price of wheat was higher.  Either way, there is no net benefit for the public.  Now let’s talk about the huge global downside.  The price of oil spiked astronomically on unrealized fears of what might happen in the Middle East, but which didn’t occur.  Some traders made out like bandits, while others lost big.  Bear in mind that the commodity futures market returns no money.  For each winner, there is a looser.  It is gambling.”

“Like high stakes craps?”

“It’s far more damaging to everyday people that anything in Las Vegas.  While the oil price was artificially high, all the energy companies grossly ramped up production to poke as many holes in the ground as possible, to get the oil to sell at a big profit.”

“That is when I had my last decent job.”  Donald recalled.  “I optimistically bought a few assets that I later lost, but which created my debt.”

“As many others did.  Conversely, the excessively inflated energy costs made some people loose their homes, which weighed heavily onto the sub-prime mortgages.”  The man with eternal life and youth said as he ladled the stew into two large bowls.  “Then when those Middle East fears didn’t materialize, there was an oil glut that sent the commodity price into the cellar.”

“And companies involved in the energy sector laid off workers in droves.”  Donald lamented.  “The recent hires like me lost their jobs and many who were longer term employees were out of work too.”

“So who or what was really to blame?”

“The Chicago commodity futures market?”

“Precisely.”  The mad trapper sat at the table.  He savored a bite of stew before he continued.  “Yet what we’ve discussed told of the oil fields but I haven’t mentioned all of how this affected the financial services sector.”

“People out of work defaulted on loans?”  Donald guessed.  He was one who did.

“That added pressure but the bigger damage was done at the major investor level.  To purchase a commodity future contract, a person only needs to put up 10% of the capital and the rest is on margin.  When the oil prices sharply moved, both on the way up and down, the investors would’ve been asked to top up their investments with more money.  These are called ‘margin calls’.  But as the price had already gone so high, or so low, that the futures gamblers were better off just folding and walking away from the table.  Those loan defaults were really the ones that hurt the financial institutions but the sub-prime mortgages took more than their share of the blame.  The bankers and the media would rather point fingers at the small people, than to put the real situation up where all could look in disgust at it.”

“Blaming the people,” Donald mused, “the bankers went to the Government and asked the taxpayers to foot the bill.  And the big money people reneged on their bets but walked away still rich.”

“Yah.  That’s the way it works.  I’ve seen it happen over and over again.  One should think that people would eventually learn – but they don’t seem to.”

The stranded and unemployed guest munched away on his stew, while his mind digested the conversation.  The mad trapper’s ghost was also quiet during the rest of the repast.  After the last drops of gravy were daubed up with buttered bread, the two men carried the dishes to the washstand sink.

“What do you want me to do?”  Donald finally asked.

“I’m offering you the opportunity to make a loud statement.”  Nicholas Flamel said.  “I’ve stocked this cabin with everything you would need.”

The Mad Trapper’s Ghost – Part Two

It was still winter when Donald entered the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Building.  Under his overcoat, he had an array of loaded weapons strapped to his body and his satchel contained both spare ammunition and some improvised grenades made with dynamite taped up with nails for fragmentation.  He started his killing rampage with a shotgun.

“This is as easy as the mad trapper said it would be.”  Donald muttered as he killed and he recalled the discussion with his mentor.

‘I don’t think my good conscience will allow me to take a life.’  Donald had said.

‘The law will actually assist you.’  Flamel had countered.  ‘Don’t think about killing or hurting people.  Concentrate only on the laws against murder that you are harming.  Each law is an imaginary item that belongs to the hated government.  In fact, you’ll find that they are good targets, regardless of the living people hiding behind them.’

“Take that you sleazy law!”  Donald yelled as his automatic rifle mowed through a group of commodity traders.  The eternally young trapper’s views on law had been the final argument that had shown Donald what he needed to do.

‘The most pernicious document in the history of mankind was signed 115 years before I was born and my extended life’s mission is to show common people just how badly the Magna Charta hurt them.’  Albert Johnson had explained.  ‘Putting law in place was the Sophists finally defeating Aristotle.  The creation of law doomed folk to hundreds of years of serfdom to greedy liars and lawyers.  Law is the real cause of heinous crimes like debt-based money and commodity futures trading.’

The killer expended all his ammunition and threw all his grenades to devastating effect and unmolested by the police, the death toll climbed.  Finally, Donald was done.  He kicked open the front doors and strolled out with his hands in the air.

“If even a few of you had any guts,” Donald said under his breath as a knot of cops raced up the stairs towards him, “you could’ve entered and engaged me, to the effect of saving any number of innocent lives.”  He saw that the police forces had stayed outside establishing a cordoned off area, and hiding behind their squad cars when shots were heard.

The mass murderer used his final few seconds to reflect on Albert’s explanation.  ‘There’s no such thing as an innocent life.  The Akashic Record shows that each happening is earned and owed as karma.  I’ve perused the Akashic Records and have seen that some of those you’ll take have well and truly earned a death even in this life.  But no soul is ever harmed.  They will return in another life.’

The police gang tackled the surrendering shooter.  Then as he went down under the fists and kicks from the swarm of thugs, Donald triggered his last piece of ordinance.  And the girdle of TNT under his sweatshirt exploded.

The Mad Trapper’s Ghost – Part Three

“Job well accomplished.”  Albert Johnson watched the breaking news segment.  “The video of the exploding scrum of cops was especially compelling.”

“Now we will likely never know why.”  The newscaster’s voice was near breathless.

“Even had he lived you would never find out why.”  The 700-year-old man scoffed at the TV set.  “Because you main stream journalists are deathly afraid of asking that 3-letter question.”

Nicholas Flamel shut off the TV and left the motel room.  He had some work to do in erasing the evidence of his involvement.  The cabin would be burnt to the ground.

‘What caused you to first understand law as you do?’  Donald had asked in the final moments before his terminal walk from the pickup truck to the building.

‘My wife Pernelle was taken from me in the flower of her regained youth.’  Nicholas Flamel had explained.  ‘Since its very inception, law has been people’s worst enemy.  Law is insidious though because through the Sophist’s deceptions, the common folk wrongly believe that law is protecting them.  What law is really doing is stripping away freedom, while concurrently making crime into a growth industry – which is precisely what the Sophists want.’

‘I’ve seen mass killings like this before.’  Donald said as his friend and teacher keyed his ignition.  ‘But I’ve never understood them as I do now.  Did you have your fingers in them?’

‘Some.’

‘Will my message be understood?’  Donald asked.

‘Many will wail and ask why.  A few will understand that the only possible reason is as a political statement.  And a couple will think it through further to realize that it wouldn’t happen if the law didn’t pave a track to it.  As individuals, people are quick on the uptake but as a group, they are slow learners.  It’s difficult too, with Sophist spin doctors planting misdirecting propaganda at each step of the way forward.’

‘Is it worth it?’

‘If you don’t think so,’ Albert patted his short-term friend on the forearm, ‘then don’t carry it through to the end.’  Then he waved goodbye and put the vehicle into gear.