Free The Arcturus Man by John Strauchs

goose down. She slid in. The pillows were like clouds. It was heavenly. The sheets
were satin and felt cool to her bare skin. Suddenly, one of the windows opened and the
lights dimmed and then were off entirely. She wasn’t used to sleeping with an open window, but since Ginger thought that it was good for her, she decided to try it. A cold blast
of air confirmed her decision to not get out of bed.
She had forgotten to lock the door.
She could call out from the bed to have Ginger lock it, but she didn’t want to raise her
voice to the point that Jared would hear her locking the door. She let it go.
Moonlight was shining into the room. It was ethereal. The Eve of Saint Agnes swam in her mind.
“ The silver moonlight is so beautiful ,” she thought. “ It was a very
nice evening .” She was glad she came. She tightened her covers around her.
“Good night, Jared,” she said softly under her breath. For a moment, she thought
she heard him reply. It was the distant wind. She fell asleep.
Jared paced in his darkened room.
He walked to the window and looked out
across the bay. He couldn’t see the watcher, but somene was out there. He could sense it
clearly, but this time it was different. This one wasn’t just nameless, it was soulless.

Chapter Three – The Cold Years
Valmiera, Latvia – 1981 To 1986
    Jared, or as he was known then, Jorens, had a brief, wonderful childhood growing
up on his father’s farm in Kocenu County, near Valmiera in Latvia. It wasn’t actually his
father’s farm then, even though his mother always spoke of it that way. It was turned into
a collective farm in 1950, years before Jared was born. It had been his grandfather’s farm
prior to the Second World War and the family owned it since his great-grandfather’s father bought it from a German land baron in 1836. Ownership or not, the Ziemelis family
had lived on the farm for centuries. It was more than 600 hectares.
It had been much
larger at one time, but the land reform acts of the 1920s broke it up into several farms.
Still, it was larger than most other farms in the region. It included a small forest, a fishing
pond, and hundreds of arable acres.
But now all that belonged to the collective. Jared’s
father, Karlis, was born in 1951. His grandfather, also Karlis, was shipped off to the gulags in 1951 so Jared never got to know him.
    His father completed a five-year engineering degree at the Cesis Polytechnic University. He had a small bureaucratic position in the county government. They had a small
apartment in Valmiera. They lived on the farm in one room only in the summer and only
worked it on weekends. When small private gardens were permitted, he and his wife,
Erika, spent more time working on the farm.
Jared was always with them when they
tended the large garden. The boy loved to plant radishes and beets.
    The boy was fully aware of his surroundings by the age of one. He spoke in complete sentences before the end of his first year of life. By two he learned to read and
write. By three his mental age was equivalent to a boy of eleven or twelve, and perhaps
yet older. No one could measure his intelligence accurately. By the time that Jared
reached a chronological age of five, his mental development was too advanced to be believed by those tending him.
    The neighbors often talked about the remarkable boy at the Kalnvej Collective.
They talked about the boy with great pride.
Although Stalin had been dead for more almost three decades when Jared was born, people were still careful about what they said in
public. Their talk wasn’t meant for outside ears. He was one of their own. Stories about
the remarkable boy were overheard, however. A local technocrat from Valmiera reported
it to another technocrat in Riga. It finally came to the attention of Professor Krebs, a
high-ranking official at the Institute of Biotechnology in Vilnius, Lithuania SSR. If what
was being said about this remarkable boy was true, they wanted to study him. He