I kept the copy On Dying that Jack Ring gave me well hidden, and I read it every chance that I got. When I got better and was discharged from the hospital, Jack bought me a ticket to the East. He skimmed money off of two of his latest Mummy films and arranged a most extraordinary trip for me: The Trail of the Dead. The Trail of the Dead is a traditional pilgrimage for adherents to the ideas of Jonathan Graves. The Trail follows the same journey that Jonathan Graves took during the late 1800s when on a path of self-discovery, he died, was resuscitated, and came to the realization that death must be defeated in his lifetime – no matter what. I took a boat across the Pacific, landed in India, traveled up the Ganges River to its source in the Himalayas, then made my way high up into the mountains. In his youth, Jonathan Graves wanted like many theosophical Englishman to see the holy source of the Ganges and meet mystical gurus on the high Tibetan plateau. He never expected to have a radical conversion with major’ planetary historical implications. I was one careless driver flailing past another even more careless driver in the dark of a Hollywood night. Jonathan Graves had a heart condition. His heart could simply not take the strain of the incredible altitude. While trying to track down a Holy Man who had proof of the lost civilization of Ancient Mu, Premier Graves’ heart gave out momentarily. He was dead for no more than thirty seconds before being revived by the Holy Man he was looking for. Thirty seconds, on this side of the frame, is all that it took. On my trip, I found the exact spot where he died. It is Tibet which is under control of Communist China. I had to sneak into the area. The spot itself has been concealed by the faithful. Standing there, you can still feel the power as if Jonathan Graves left some essence of himself behind for all his future followers to experience a moment of powerful conversion themselves. It didn’t take me long to realize that this was a man I wanted to follow. This made sense. We shouldn’t have to die. Dying is such a terrible, terrifying waste of human life. We spend our lives creating and building who we are only to allow ourselves to be merged back with something without form, color, sense.

I never even bothered to return to the States. I sent a wire to Jack Ring which said just… Thank You… That’s all I had to say. Thank you for caring. Thank you for showing me the way. Thank you and I’ll thank you again when we’re reunited in Gravesend.

With the travel money I had, I made my way to Europe and contacted the Gravesend Embassy in Romania. I had friends in Hollywood with Communist Party connections who pulled some strings and got me entry first into the Soviet Bloc where I made preparations to emigrate to Gravesend.

I died on the night of August 11, 1966 just past midnight – I remember being revived and looking up at the night sky which was alive with one of the most incredible Perseid Meteor showers. They were like thousands upon thousands of lit arrows fired in my honor, welcoming me into a brave new future.

No sooner had I died and been revived then I got the chance to travel to Bellegravia. The Arctic Summer Day was just beginning to wane when I arrived. And the white city sparkled in that light. I was there for two weeks, living in an apartment with an old friend when there was a knock upon the door. It was KRIPT, the secret police. I thought at first that they were checking up to make sure the new arrival wasn’t a spy, but no they were there to recruit me.

The head officer was named Ruth. She was a counter-information officer for KRIPT and explained that communicating the Gravesend message was one of the most important focuses of the security apparatus. CRIPT knew that I’d come from Hollywood and they were eager to tap my communication skills. I jumped at the opportunity.

That first day, marching into CRIPT Headquarters in Bellegravia. I remember thinking about my old life. How insignificant? I thought. Making movies so teens could go touch each other in the darkness of a movie theater. This, this was important. This was nothing less than a full scale battle against death. To extend life.

I once thought I was so lucky to be alive… after my accident. Lucky? As if life were a privilege. It’s not.

It’s a right.

People probably don’t remember who I am. There might be some who saw the modestly successful Curse of the Mummy series. Perhaps they saw them in a drive-in, used the scary parts to pull their sweetheart closer. Maybe I was their sweetheart. I never made it into larger pictures, however, for ten years from the late fifties to the mid-sixties I was definitely the B-Movie queen. The Curse of the Mummy films were strange pictures about a mysterious mummy that showed no sign of decay and was found on the high, windswept reaches of the Tibetan Plateau. Some mad doctor in the film rants about a forgotten technology that bestows immortal life. At the time, I thought nothing of it… well, nothing. I wasn’t doing the picture for its Shakespeare caliber dialog. Looking back on the film, I suppose I could find some clues that would tip me off where the financing came from. It was a crude piece of propaganda funded by West Coast Gravesend sympathizers. This was the fifties though, and we hadn’t quite shifted from the Red Scare to the Dead Scare. But it was coming.

I continued on doing five more Mummy films along with dozens of other forgettable pictures until March 21, 1964. I was driving back to my house in Toluca Lake from a party in Beverly Hills. I had just made a right hand turn onto Mulholland Drive and was heading East when another car swerved onto my side of the road. I tried to swerve out of the way and went off the road and promptly off a 50 foot drop. The car didn’t explode, but I was shredded.

And I died. For a few moments at the hospital while in surgery, I was legally dead. It only took a few moments for me to realize that I never wanted to die. For the weeks of my lonely recovery, all I could think about was those terrifying moments.

No one except for my sister Pat came to visit me in the hospital. None of the producers did. None of the ones that I did did. Except for one. Jack Ring. Jack Ring was the producer of the Mummy series, and as I learned that day he visited, a secret Gravesend sympathizer.

He had heard about my moments as an actual corpse, and had snuck in a copy of the Jonathan Graves book On Dying. Jack Ring was a ruthless SOB. A real tough producer in a dirty business, but he had a strangely caring side too. Here he was, at the foot of my hospital bed carrying what is essentially the only book in America that is universally banned and is not considered protected by the First Ammendment because of its dangerous nature. Jack could have gotten himself thrown in jail that day. He could have gotten us both arrested.

A couple of days even hours before my accident I would have laughed him out of the room. But having died and seen how bad death is…

I was ready.

I recently left my job as Foreign Affairs Correspondent and Associate Editor for the opportunity of a lifetime. The American Magazine, National Geographic had received a request from the Gravesend Embassy in New York. The People’s Republic of Gravesend is a closed country and rarely opens itself for scrutiny by members of the press: especially press from the media in the Western World. But there are suggestions swirling around that the winds of change are beginning to blow, however faintly, in that mysterious state at the top of the world. The National Geographic had received an open invitation to send a reporter/photographer to do a wide ranging piece on Gravesend.

There was one stipulation, Gravesend authorities wanted me, Terrence Rowley Jackson to do the piece. The day after the request, some gentlemen from the Foreign Office politely knocked down my door and ransacked my apartment trying to find evidence that I was a sleeper cell agent set up in a London flat by CRIPT. The most incriminating evidence that they found were pictures of me and Anne Jackson, my late wife.

Anne Jackson, b. 1964 – d. 1999 is a ranking official in the Gravesend Ministry of Information.

The men from the Foreign Office had me dead to rights on one thing: I miss my wife more than anything in the whole world, and I’d kill for one more chance to hold her again. It seems all those sleepless, drunken nights of wishing she were still with me, pleading red eyed to her pictures to come back to me… Those prayers had for better or worse come back to me. Perhaps even to haunt me.

Anne Murrow Jackson was diagnosed with brain cancer in July of ’97 just two years after we had been married. I had never known a girl like her. I was a dull, deathly dull, boring economist who loved to argue geopolitics. She was a visual display coordinator for a mini-chain of London fashion stops. She was wonderfully creative and found inspiration in every inch of her life. Like most people who came of age in the 1980s, she had a dark side. In her formative years, she listened to a steady wave of moody synth pop and was known to feign seizures and even demonic possession to get out of high school. She was Goth with a sunny disposition

I knew that she had a fascination with death. But when she was diagnosed with cancer and given about seven months to live, what I thought was a radical change came over her. Despite her interest in the macabre, she was always so full of life. I knew that this was quite a hit to take, but I just felt that she would overcome the gloom. She didn’t. She became closed off. Uncommunicative.

I found a copy of Jonathan Graves On Dying. She was extremely defensive about it when I confronted her. In the matter of a few months, she was making arrangements to emigrate to Gravesend. She had contacted the PRG Consul in Berlin and was going first to St. Petersburg in the Soviet Union where she would be killed via controlled euthanasia then revived( to emigrate to Gravesend, you need to present a death certificate). Final resuscitory measures would be taken in Gravesend upon entry to the country.

We had saved up quite a bit of money to buy a house in the South of France which she took( I would have given it to her freely and gladly). In the middle of the night, a windy, cloudy moonless night, in the Fall of 1998 she left me to make her way across Europe. I heard the front door click ever so softly. I immediately knew it was her. I ran to the door then down the stairs and into the empty streets. Thought I telephoned the police and said she was probably trying to emigrate to Gravesend, she was able to slip out of the country.

The last I ever saw of her was kissing the top of her head as I said good night.

I tried following her trail across Europe and made it all the way to East Berlin, but there the trail died. I had run out of bribe money. By the time friends were able to wire me additional funds, the flat-lining procedure had already taken place in a clinic in a back alley in St. Petersburg. Soviet authorities stopped me in Warsaw and put me on a train that didn’t stop until Hamburg.

I thought of her often, and even talked to her in dreams. I, of course, knew where Anne had gone. I’ve even applied at the Gravesend Consul for papers to travel to the country, but the stone faced officials assured me that the Gravesend citizen in question had no interest in seeing me.

As much as I hated to admit it, death had done us apart. Still, I held on that one day I would see her again.

Whether or not I am actually prepared, that day is fast approaching.