Monday, January 11, 2016

Day 26 (a sub plot, written on the spot)


He received the phone call from the Institute at 4:30 am. They were adamant at meeting on location. With no time to brew a fresh pot of coffee, he microwaved a cold cup from the day before and hit the road. By the time he was in the desert flatlands, the mountains had begun to glow at their edges.The further he sped up long sections of washed out highway, and entered the steep, winding sections into Funeral Mountain, the rising sun began waking the colors of the mountain cliffs and walls.

He managed to arrive before them. The remains of the town were bathed in golden dawn. Slowly, with only the sound of his breathing and the crunch of gravel beneath his boots for company, he walked from building to building. It occurred to him that a ruin is a poem written long ago for an unknown reader, the author of the poem and the reader both remaining anonymous. Looking down the mountain to the farthest edge of the dry bed of the salt flats and could see the headlamps of a vehicle just descending into the valley from the opposite mountain range. It would take them at least another forty five minutes to arrive. He took this rare opportunity to explore the remains of the town by himself, and set out for the building where they had found the Stone.

This structure was once the most grand of them all, and the most intact. Inside the ruin were three rooms, one of which had in the back a set of stairs leading to a lower room, large enough to contain at most two standing people. In a wall was a niche which contained a rusty and long since opened safe. He made his way through the rubble, and with his mobile phone as a light, descended the stairs for the first time in years, and for the very first time without being in the company of someone from the Institute.

From the 1860s until the town was finally abandoned in the early 1940s, the town was inhabited by fringe and counter culture groups of people. At first it was the Spiritualist rage for seances. The wealthy from all over the west coast came to commune with their dead through a renowned Madame, who herself walked into a chloride mine one morning at dusk and was never seen again. Next came the Alastair Crowley initiates for their exclusive enlightenment, followed by a mysterious stranger who preached that the town had wronged by mining for minerals to sell to a profane world, and claimed to know the location of a place where they could mine pure color, color that once freed from the depths of the mountain would change the world. Such were the denizens of this forlorn, but once thriving town high up in the harsh arms of Funeral Mountain. 


In the late 1960s a lone gay couple had moved into a shell of a house and attempted to breathe new life into it. They tried to tame some of the stray burrows that had descended in lineage from the pioneering days, and hoped to give rides to tourists on the backs of these beasts to the now useless mines. When one of the men staggered barefoot and covered in blood into the nearby town of Beatty, the police drove to the ghost town where they observed a strange pattern written in blood on the walls of the most prominent building, and the dead lover laid on his back, head arms and legs draped over large, square stones, looking like a painting from the Old Masters in the morning sun. At his trial for murder, the surviving, would be tour guide told the jury that they had found a stone with precisely those markings in a safe hidden in the building, and that after fasting and taking acid, the sacrifice was demanded of them by the Stone. This Stone then became lost in a dusty evidence room for a number of years.



The desert hills are full of petroglyphs made by the ancients. Most are representative, and often depict a man, an animal, or a combination of both, engaged in an activity such as hunting. But some are abstract, and depict in line and color, a variety of geometric shapes. A detective who had worked the murder case had taken to the search for petroglyphs as a hobby after he retired, and at once he recognized with a shudder that seemed to come up from the earth itself and through his body, an abstract petroglyph as identical to the markings in blood left at the murder site.

The Stone went into federal custody where it found a champion in a passionate, yet low level agent who specialized in pre colonial cave and rock art. It was around his newly inflamed passion for the Stone that an small department was created to find a relationship between the Stone and the petroglyph. After a year and a half of going nowhere, it was not until a complete mapping by satellite of the entire region was done and put online that one researcher on the team discovered the original layout of the town was patterned after the markings on The Stone. 



He waited outside the ruin in the bright morning sun, crushing a cigarette as the car from the Institute pulled up. He felt the heat already coming both from the stones beneath his feet and the sky above, and thought that anything living was never truly welcome here. The chief researcher got out of the SUV and looked across the sky. Though no stars remained, the moon could be seen retreating under the mountains to the west. He explained that models had been created which simulated the shifting of constellations and galaxies over tens of thousands of years, tracings of comets, of stars dying, of moons being formed. A carbon dating of a small fragment of the petroglyph matched the way the heavens were arranged at the time of its making.
They spoke for most of the day, so excited as to not even move into the shade about these new discoveries. A town has a history of utopians and dystopians, a freak show since the first cornerstone was laid. A murder reveals an enigmatic stone with curious markings as a motive for a human sacrifice. A petroglyph reveals a map of the town, finally seen to match the night stars as the were tens of thousands of years prior. 



Surely the Ancient Ones, who had never settled on this spot, must have marked this town as a fowl blight under the sun, cursed and to be avoided. By evening they had decided to move research headquarters to the town. There was indeed money in their budget to restore the building, and furnish it with the most contemporary of instruments, machinery and climate controlled storage. The Stone deserved to be returned to its home, and a fresh exploration of the local canyons for petroglyphs could begin.

The town had new life.

To quote the film, Dead Man, “Stupid Fucking White Man”

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