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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