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n a warm, breezy late summer Tuesday afternoon south of San Diego, Brian Tillman reclined with his hands clasped behind his head on a large beach towel. With his surfboard lying on the sand by his side, he was recovering from the battle with his latest set of waves. Life, in a word, was good.
But the very setting currently providing Brian’s enjoyment would soon become an eerie pathway leading to a dark, dangerous, terrifying struggle for survival.
Normally, he would have been working. But when Hurricane Sergio had stalled, wobbling in a circle like a drunken sailor 300 miles off the Baja peninsula, the lure of surfing had become irresistible, and Brian had taken the week off. Why crunch numbers in accounting when there was surf, babes, and beach?
While Brian’s breathing returned to normal, he fought the urge to grab his waxed board and trot back into the waves. Like frothy sirens, endless eight to ten-footers with crests straight as a ruler beckoned, marching far into the shallows before they overbalanced and toppled with a thunderous crash.
Brian reluctantly turned his gaze away, and let his eyes wander lecherously over the dazzling display of young womanhood surrounding him. Sighing silently, he watched a sinuous brunette and slinky redhead stroll along the surf’s edge laughing about some private joke, and wondered what it would be like to bed the duo (or some other) just once in a ménage à trois before he evolved into an old codger, and finally snuffed it. Yeah, it’s a guy thing, he thought, but what the heck? Fantasies never hurt anyone. And once in awhile, they might come true.
Craning his head further, he gazed over his shoulder at small knots of glistening, oil-slathered women tanning on the beach, and wondered how many of them had taken time off from work as he had, or were simply young housewives or students unburdened by the daily grind.
While gazing behind him, Brian noticed a man who was so out-of-place for the beach that he did a double-take and rubbed his eyes. Clad in an expensively tailored business suit, the portly, middle-aged, balding man appeared to be lost. Casting his gaze about desperately, the stranger wandered deeper into knots of sunbathers, occasionally bending to ask a question. As Brian continued staring, a sudden gust of wind grabbed the man’s tie with invisible hands, causing it to blow sideways and ripple violently across his face. Cursing, the stranger angrily snagged his wayward tie, and stuffed the fluttering ends in his breast pocket.
After a brief pause during which he cupped one hand over his brow and slowly scanned his surroundings in all directions, the fellow resumed his slow plod down the beach.
That’s when Brian noticed the most ridiculous thing of all: with each step the stranger took, sand spilled over the edges of his leather shoes, turning his navy socks tan to the ankles. Brian shook his head in disbelief and chuckled into his hand. “What a wanker. He looks like a reject from an Andy Griffith rerun.”
As Brian turned his head back to the spectacle of the crashing waves, he noticed other beachgoers had spotted the stranger, too, and were doing their best (mostly without success) to hide their disbelief and laughter.
Just when Brian had his own laughing fit under control, another thought sprang to mind: what if the oddball was a rich businessman who had come looking for his young, wayward wife? “A sugar daddy with a huge bankroll, and a fleshy ‘jelly roll’ around his waist, to match,” Brian managed before a fresh bout of giggles shook him. Frowning in concentration, he willed the hilarious thought from his mind, praying it wasn’t true for the sake of the imagined wife. What an embarrassment that would be.
Moments later just as he made the decision to grab his surfboard and catch another set, Brian felt a light tapping on his shoulder while an unknown male voice cleared its throat. Brian turned and was shocked to find himself virtually nose to nose with the red, sweating face of the misfit stranger. Pressing ahead, the man continued, clearly flustered by his situation, “I—I’m sorry for the intrusion, but are you Mr. Brian Tillman of 2389 Magnolia Lane, San Diego?”
After a short pause to recover from being taken aback, Brian said, “Yes. What’s this about?”
Rather than reply immediately, the stranger dug into an inside pocket of his suit coat and withdrew a thick parcel. “Before showing you this, I also need to know if you are the Nephew of Emery G. Tillman?”
Brian gasped audibly, and sucked in his breath. It had been almost twenty years since the single occasion during which he’d met his Uncle. “Yes, I’m Emery Tillman’s Nephew,” he managed. “But again I ask: what’s this all about?”
Panting in the stifling heat of his suit, the stranger said, “It concerns the will of your Uncle. You are his sole legal heir.” Tapping the thick document, he added, “This is the will.” Pausing to wipe sweat pouring from his brow in rivulets, the man stuffed the will back into his inside pocket, adding, “Excuse me for rambling. Heat’s getting to me. It’s been a long trip.” Reaching into another pocket with a sweaty hand, he withdrew a business card and handed it to Brian. “I’m William Rothchild of the New York law firm Goldman and Rothchild. I was assigned to locate you and go over your Uncle’s will. Would have saved a lot of time and effort if I could have reached you by phone.”
Brian blushed and lowered his eyes. “Sorry about that, Mr. Rothchild. I’m one of those people who guard their privacy zealously. That applies especially to phones. Even at work.”
William smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “What matters is that I found you. Anyway, I’d like to suggest we meet elsewhere in a cooler, more professional setting before I die of heat stroke.”
“Sure,” Brian said, “But I don’t understand. I only met my Uncle once, and that was decades ago when I was ten or so.”
“That may be,” William panted, “but you are the only surviving heir. You stand to inherit everything your Uncle has.”
Stunned by the day’s weird turn of events, Brain asked, “Just one question: How large is the estate? I don’t mean to sound shallow and greedy, but I know next to nothing about my Uncle. He was a mystery to the entire family: a recluse, for lack of better terms.”
William turned and beckoned Brian to follow. “The estate is quite large,” he puffed, looking back over his shoulder. “Let me put it this way,” he said, struggling to be heard above the sound of crashing surf and blaring music carried on the salty breeze, “If you so choose, you’ll never have to work again.” A sudden smile crossed his face. “And neither will I. My retainer for this account will allow me to retire years sooner than I’d planned.”
Then William stopped, turned suddenly and said, “But there is a catch: the estate is null and void where you’re concerned if we fail to visit a ranch your Uncle owns in Utah within a week of my having located you. Should you fail to tour the ranch with me, all proceeds from your Uncle’s estate are to be disbursed to several scientific foundations. Er, that doesn’t affect my earnings in this matter one way or another, but it certainly would affect yours.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Brian asked with a smile. “The clock’s ticking. Let’s get moving.”
“I thought you’d see it that way,” William said as he turned and trudged up the beach with a speechless, stunned Brian lugging his surfboard in tow. Not once did Brian think of how utterly ridiculous the pair looked as they made their way to the parking lot, eventually reaching William’s rental car. |
Later that evening after dinner, going over the estate in some detail with William, and finally crawling into bed, Brian found himself unable to sleep.
Williams had been right: the amount of the estate was a whopping 11.3 million, give or take a few hundred thou. At thirty-four years of age with considerable stock market savvy, and well-established in his accounting career, Brian was old and wise enough to realize that only an utter fool could fail to live extremely well on such a sum, even if he played things boldly, and took a few calculated risks. Brian had no intention of going Bonzo and ending up in a soup line three year from now. With that much money, he could stuff it all in savings accounts, and live off the low-yield interest and still live like a king, if nothing else.
While he tossed and turned beneath the sheets, Brian’s thoughts always returned to his Uncle. The man was a mystery who had distanced himself from the family long before Brian’s one meeting with him. What had his Uncle Emory done to amass such an estate?
Struggling to recall that one meeting with his Uncle at a family reunion in Santa Barbara, Brian’s brows knitted in concentration. He remembered seeing Uncle Emery sitting at the bar on a stool in the rec. room, nursing a drink. He seemed to recall that his uncle was of slight build, perhaps even gaunt. But maybe that was because the man had sat hunched over his drink, perhaps to ward off unwanted conversation? From what little his young ears had heard, it seemed likely. Nothing changed that impression as Brian had grown older. In fact, Uncle Emory had later dropped from sight like someone in the witness protection program hiding from the Mob.
What Brian did remember from that encounter was his Uncle’s strange eyes. When young Brian had approached the man and tapped him lightly on the sleeve of his sweater, his Uncle had turned his head, glanced downward at Brian, and fixed him for several unsettling moments with winter-gray orbs. Just as Brian had been about to turn and run, his Uncle smiled, extended a hand with long, elegant fingers (a piano player’s fingers, Brian’s mother had often said), and gently rubbed young Brian on the head. “You must be Nephew Brian,” he’d said with surprising warmth in his voice.
The seeming genuineness of his Uncle’s smile had driven away any previous prejudices young Brian had heard about his reclusive Uncle. For the next hour, Brian had probed the man boldly with countless questions, and his Uncle had answered many of them.
Yes, it was true, Uncle Emory had said, he’d worked for a couple of top-secret federal agencies ‘sort of like but different than the FBI or CIA.’ Yes, the work he’d done for the government was top-secret scientific research. No, he couldn’t talk about it. Not even to a curious young Nephew, who never seemed to run out of questions. Yes, it was true that he no longer worked for the government, but his work for a private scientific group was no less secret, and he couldn’t talk about that, either.
After an hour or so, Uncle Emery had gently eased Brian to the floor, and told him that he needed to go see some of the other relatives. Brian had thanked his Uncle and started to turn away.
But he didn’t turn away quite fast enough.
As the older man turned to leave, Brian noticed Uncle Emory’s silver handled walking cane for the first time. Propped against the bar next to the stool, it had remained concealed in shadows, shielded by his Uncle’s body. Over the past twenty years, Brian had nearly forgotten the cane. Now, memory flooded back in shocking force, chilling Brian unexpectedly.
How could he ever have forgotten that cane? Perhaps over the years, he’d subconsciously sought to remember his Uncle more kindly than other in the family had.
But there was no getting around the truth: his Uncle’s elaborate walking stick had been a hideous thing. Made of jet-black gnarled wood shot through with slightly lighter whorls of deep blood red, the bowed staff gave the impression of great age. Just why a boy of only ten would think such a thing had troubled young Brian then, and it troubled him anew now.
The cane’s wood finish, alone, wasn’t the main reason the object seemed ancient. Rather, it was more a series of vague but intense feelings—an impression of other, darker things less well-defined.
The silver handle of the walking cane was as hideous as the wood, if not worse. During young Brian’s brief glimpse of it before his Uncle’s hand slid over the thing, concealing it, he saw what appeared to be the great, shaggy head of a snarling wolf.
But there were things about the handle’s features that weren’t right. No wolf had more than two eyes, young Brian knew. And no wolf had eyes in the places on the thing’s head and neck where he’d briefly glimpsed them. Worse, something else had occupied the two spaces where normal eyes should have been. And just before his Uncle had placed his hand over the hideous image to hobble away, those two things had seemed to wriggle a little further out of their straining, distended sockets, turning in young Brian’s direction.
His glimpse of the ghastly thing had happened in the space of perhaps two seconds. The lighting by the bar was poor, making him unsure of what he’d seen.
Shocked, Brian had watched as his Uncle hobbled away on the walking stick. Only then did he notice why his Uncle needed the cane: Uncle Emory had a club foot, and the specially made shoe on his Uncle’s lame left side dragged along the floor with a peculiar kind of scraping thump.
Just when the young boy thought that everything was over, his Uncle unexpectedly turned to him, squeezed the ghastly handle in what could only be a loving caress, and winked at his Nephew. The smile playing across his Uncle’s face at that moment seemed similar to the ones passed between Brian and his friends down at their secret tree house—a knowing smirk of secret knowledge shared by only them; knowledge not meant for anyone else.
But had any of those frightening memories actually happened? Reluctantly, Brian had to admit that he was only ten years old at the time, with a ten year-old boy’s healthy imagination.
And yet...
For the remainder of the evening, young Brian had tried several times to sneak another look at the cane’s handle without success. It had been almost as if his Uncle were teasing him, keeping the cane’s handle cradled and hidden between his knees the rest of the evening when he talked to anyone.
Frustrated, Brian rolled over, grabbed his pillow and pounded it, seeking a more comfortable sleeping position. “Screw it,” he mumbled to himself. “So what if Uncle Emory did keep to himself and had a weird cane?” he mumbled. “No reason not to be thrilled about my good fortune, now.”
With that thought, Brian settled into a deep but uneasy sleep. |
Next morning at seven, Brian arose groggy but determined to savor his last day of freedom before catching a flight to Salt Lake City with William Rothchild the following morning. Two cups of bracing espresso and a four-egg Denver omelet shook off the chains of his strange dreams, and a glowing weather report stating that Hurricane Sergio had remained nearly stationary, dissolved the few remaining links scattered about on the floor of his mind.
After quickly cleaning his apartment and making his bed, he returned to the kitchen to visit his pet bird, Clyde. Brian had named the Brazilian parrot after the infamous gangster Clyde Barrow because of the bird’s uncanny ability to pry open the cabinet and jar where its favorite food was stored, and “rob” the proceeds.
From his perch, Clyde squawked raucously and said, “Dodgers suck. Dodgers suck. Go, Padres. Dodgers suck. Awwwkkk!” Then the bird tight-roped across his perch to Brian for its reward.
“Good boy,” Brian said, feeding Clyde a couple of his favorite crackers. “The Dodgers do suck!” After Clyde was finished eating his crackers, Brian leaned over, puckered his lips, and made a kissing noise with his mouth. “Gimme a big, fat one.” Clyde craned his neck and rubbed his beak on Brian’s lips. “What a handsome guy!” Brian said. “Now, you watch out for those unwanted suitors, today, okay? Especially pigeons in parrot’s clothing.” Clyde cocked an eye at Brian and said, “Unwanted suitors suck. Awwwkkk!” Brian laughed, gently ruffled Clyde’s feathers, turned and headed for the driveway, and jumped into his Jeep. With his surfboard already stashed, he drove toward the beach, listening to a Cusco CD. A full day of surfing lay ahead.
Or so he thought. |
A little over two hours later after a brief conversation with a couple of truant fellow co-workers, Brian tackled his first set of waves, and they were real beauties. More than ever, he was glad he’s taken the week off. Southern California probably would not see this caliber of surfing again for years.
While watching the hypnotic beauty of a perfect ten-footer defy gravity and rumble nearly to the beach before breaking, Brian experienced something quite unexpected and frightening. The source of those feelings was the wave, itself. Or more accurately, that particular part of the wave surfer’s refer to as the “tube” that forms when the top of the wave starts to topple over and curl forward and down under gravity’s influence, leaving a safe hollow behind it for the surfer.
As the wave broke, the water behind the “tube” disappeared behind the toppling curl. But just before it did, Brian saw or thought he saw an intense, thinning band of unearthly, brilliant colors zigzagging through the curl.
Brian blinked in disbelief. It was the blink itself that convinced him that he hadn’t imagined the intense, chaotic swirls of azure, magenta, deep reds, and olive greens that had backlit the wave before it collapsed. For with his eyelids closed, the negative images seared on his retinas were even more bizarre. The colors had to be real.
Icy sweat sprang from Brian’s forehead and body. Intense fright and panic gripped him for no accountable reason, and he barely had the will to pause long enough to grab his board and beach towel before scrambling madly up the beach to his car, passing a few startled people along the way. During the drive home, he ran several red lights and narrowly avoided rolling the Jeep twice. He clipped a stop sign, flattened a trash can perched near a corner lot, and left numerous skid marks along the route. Miraculously, he did not hit any pedestrians or drivers. He was also fortunate that he encountered no officers of the law. If he had, Armageddon might well have come and gone before he got his license back.
Brian didn’t feel moderately safe until reaching his home twenty minutes later, and it took well into the evening before he was able to examine his unaccountable fear.
Sitting in the living room watching “Around the Horn” on Sports Center, Brian took another sip of beer to relax his jangled nerves. What had happened earlier at the beach made no sense. Never had he had the slightest fear of water.
Now that he was calm enough to examine his fear more closely, Brian replayed the entire event in his mind, and decided that it wasn’t the water or the surf that was the root of his fright, but the unaccountable colors he thought he’d witnessed within the wave, itself. No, he thought. Even that was only part of it. There had been something else, something he hadn’t realized at the time.
And then it came to him: It was the weird colors backlighting the wave, plus the unnaturally razor straight lower edge of the curl as it overbalanced and tumbled to the beach. Instead of crashing in a chaos of boiling foam, the curl had maintained its form, settling to the beach in a perfectly horizontal line, extinguishing the unnatural colors in the wave behind it like a curtain coming down at the end of a play.
Nature didn’t work that way.
The event was so weird that it reminded him of a sci-fi or horror movie where some weird force or kaleidoscope of lights was shooting into the heavens from an enclosure just before some hero closed a trapdoor, sealing the chaotic colors inside (and thus saving the world).
Reclined on the sofa, he wondered if anyone else had seen the weird event. It had happened in the space of less than two seconds. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Just a freak of nature,” he mumbled with a soft belch, and was finally able to dismiss it by downing three more beers. |
An hour after landing in Salt Lake City and retrieving their luggage, Brian and William drove south on I-15 in William’s rental car, taking in the beauty of the Wasatch Mountains flanking the road on their left. Neither of them had been to Utah, previously. As the beautiful vista rolled by, Brian imagined what the ranch must look like, snuggled in some remote mountain retreat.
As the Wasatch Mountains rolled by to the east, William shook his head and said, “I never knew such open spaces truly existed. It’s overwhelming. Even a little frightening.” Then he chuckled. “Of course it would be, growing up where I did in Norristown, Pennsylvania.”
“So you were a city boy from the beginning,” Brian replied.
“Sure was. Born in the mean streets of Philly. Youngest of seven kids. Four girls and three boys.” William turned to Brian and patted his ample gut. “You’d never guess it now, but I was one tough SOB back then: dodging neighborhood gangs when I could, or fighting them tooth and nail when I couldn’t. Got a seven inch knife scar on my left ribcage, and one busted leg before I managed to escape to college and law school, later. Paid my own way, too. My parents were both blue collar. They did well to keep a roof over our heads.” His eyes grew misty. “Yeah. My folks did right by us with what they had.”
Fascinated, Brian listened as William recalled the struggles he’d overcome. Thirty minutes later when William finished his account, Brian had a newfound respect for the man.
A little over two hours into their trip after curving to the southwest, climbing over the mountains, and descending the pass on the far side, Brian began to wonder if the view from the ranch might not be a disappointment. The mountains to the west were retreating rapidly, leaving the travelers driving south on a barren flatland that was part of Lake Bonneville as indicated by their map.
But there was no water to be seen. Only flat, barren scrub land. Had either of them done a little research, they would have realized that Lake Bonneville was the ancestral Great Salt Lake, and that its waters had evaporated and retreated during the thousands of years after the end of the last ice age, leaving behind a forbidding, dry lakebed over much of its former area.
A quick glance at the map showed the ranch to be near the small town of Delta, Utah, only another hour south and a little west. The duo were now close enough to see that Uncle Emory’s ranch was most likely situated somewhere on this desolate flatland.
Why would his Uncle purchase property in such a setting, when Utah had so many visually stunning choices?
The two men’s confusion would only grow when they finally saw the ranch. |
After exiting the highway south of Delta and crossing a cattle guard bordered by a barbed wire fence, Brian and William drove 22 miles southwest on a rough dirt road. In their wake, dust billowed into the sky. Several times, the road became so rough that they were forced to slow to a crawl to avoid puncturing the car’s oil pan. Twice, they had to detour around mud puddles at low water crossings.
“You sure we took the right exit?” Brian asked.
Pointing to the map, William said, “If the mileage left in the instructions is right, then this is it.”
“Well, I sure hope nothing bad happens to the car,” Brian said. “We haven’t seen a soul since leaving the highway. It would be one hell of a long hike out.”
The two drove on in silence, rounding a low set of foothills to their right. As they progressed, Brian’s hopes rose, a little. They seemed to be approaching some mountains. Perhaps Uncle Emory’s ranch was located there.
But the route marked on the map steered them around the mountains. Six miles later, they got their first glimpse of the ranch.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Brian said. “There must be some mistake.”
Less than 100 yards ahead inside a tall hurricane fence topped with coiled barbed wire and a healthy sprinkling of weathered “No Trespassing” signs, a stark, unpainted cement building squatted in the mid afternoon heat. The structure looked like one of those long-abandoned gas stations from the 1950’s. “What a dump,” Brian said. “Reminds me of that gas station in the movie The Hills Have Eyes.”
“Never saw it,” William said.
Brian laughed. “You should. Take your wife and kids, and be sure to eat a shitload of popcorn and drink a gallon or two of Coke early on.”
William eyed Brian suspiciously and said, “Why do I get the feeling you’re putting me on?”
“Only because I am,” Brian smiled back. “Actually, that movie’s nasty. Not something for a quiet family outing.”
William grunted, consulted the map again, and then handed it to Brian. “Unless I’m cross-eyed, this is the ranch.”
Brian frowned at the map for a few moments, and sighed, “Let’s go tour this dump so that we can earn our takes.”
“Yeah,” William said, still embarrassed, “Look at the bright side: you’ll feel better later on, sitting on top of all those millions.”
Brian drove the car across another cattle guard and up a gravel road, stopping near the front of the building. After climbing out of the vehicle, they crossed a cement slab leading to the front door. To their left, two grimy windows stared out like milky cataracts at a dust devil swirling on the plains 200 yards away. Pausing at the door, William fished keys from his pocket, and tried three times before finding the right one. As the drab light gray metal door swung open on protesting hinges, William said, “I’d half hoped that none of the keys would fit, and that we’d somehow screwed up.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Brian said. “With luck, we can be sleeping in a couple of plush beds somewhere in Salt Lake City, tonight...if our cell phones will work in this God-forsaken place.”
Brian reflexively flipped a wall switch to the left of the door, not expecting it to work. “I’ll be damned,” he said when the overhead fluorescents flickered on. “You have the juice turned back on?”
Equally surprised, William said, “No, I didn’t. And I’m pretty sure no one else from my firm did, either.”
“Well, we’re getting electricity from somewhere.” Nodding straight ahead, Brian added, “Looks like there’s a basement. Maybe the tittie bar and other nifty stuff’s down there.”
Gazing slowly around at the stark contents of the twenty by thirty foot room, William grunted, “Sure isn’t up here: two drafting tables and equipment, three stools, four metal file cabinets, a coffee pot, microwave, small ‘fridge, sink, a reading lamp and recliner...and a ton of books.”
Brian snapped his fingers. “That’s it!” he said, “I bet my Uncle used this place for some of his research after he left his last government position behind. The living quarters must be somewhere else on the property.”
“Not according to this plat,” William said after ruffling through some documents he’d brought along. “Shows one building on 835 acres, and this is it. But that doesn’t mean that he might not have lived in the basement. With the money he had, he might have built a castle down there.”
“Could be,” Brian said. “Why don’t you check out the basement while I go through the stuff up here and see if I can learn anything.”
“Sounds good to me,” William said. Turning away, he ambled to a locked stout metal door and fished the keys from his pocket, again. After a few tries, he found the right key, opened the door, and turned on a light. Closing the door behind him, he glanced briefly down the drab concrete stairs, sighed, and headed toward the basement, noting that the lights were enclosed in industrial grade metal cages. “So much for the castle. What a shit pit,” he said, following the string of ceiling lights to another door twenty feet away. After a few seconds, he found the right key, unlocked a stout metal door that looked as if it had been stolen from a bank vault, and entered another room.
While William proceeded to the basement, Brian strode to the metal file cabinets. Surprisingly, they were unlocked. The first two contained scientific data that he didn’t understand. But at least he now knew that this facility had been used for research.
But based upon the complex nature of the notes and schematics, there should have been far more scientific apparatus here than what he saw. Perhaps the equipment was in the basement behind additional locked doors.
Fascinated, Brian scanned the files in more detail. Apparently, his deceased Uncle had been attempting to open a wormhole—a physical rift in the fabric of time and space that would lead to distant places in the cosmos, or perhaps even to other dimensions. Brian knew a little about wormhole theory from scientific programs on TV. He also knew that the physics behind such a theory was wild speculation. “Jesus,” Brian muttered, “My Uncle was into some funky stuff.”
Brian’s Uncle couldn’t have been in such research, alone. The money needed to build much of the apparatus depicted was staggering. He seemed to recall that Uncle Emory had mentioned working with others in his private research. This must be what they were doing.
With increasing interest, Brian turned his attention to the third file cabinet; it contained more of the same. But now Brian noticed a pattern. It appeared that he had gone through his Uncle’s research notes, starting with the oldest, first. Now, the schematics appeared less cumbersome (even if the physics and math behind them were not). The drawings of the scientific equipment appeared more compact with less individual pieces. Perhaps the contents of the fourth cabinet would reveal the final efforts his Uncle and his cohorts had achieved. “They probably never actually built any of this stuff,” he mumbled.
Then Brian stooped and removed a dog-eared notebook from the bottommost shelf. When he opened it and started reading, he was shocked to discover the nature of its contents. The diary implied that his reclusive Uncle had probably been a little looney, after all. And it also shed light on the real impetus behind his deceased Uncle’s research.
The diary revealed that his Uncle had stumbled onto some sort of ancient relic while vacationing with distant relatives in Romania decades ago. Influenced by what they had told him, his Uncle had gone so far as to steal this so-called relic and take it back to the States.
According to the notes, his Uncle thought the talisman was a gateway or key to another universe; a universe populated by “Ancient Ones.” Further reading revealed that those possessing sufficient knowledge could not only let the “Ancient Ones” through a gateway to our dimension, but control the alien entities as well.
But his Uncle had been unsuccessful mastering the talisman, although supposedly he had learned sufficient knowledge to partially activate it while visiting his relatives in Romania. Thinking that he could uncover additional knowledge from ancient obscure texts, Emory had channeled his efforts in that direction for over fifteen years unsuccessfully.
Rather than give up, he had chosen a new tack many years ago: science. If he couldn’t open the gate via the talisman, perhaps he could open the gate through physics, equations, and hardware. With a PhD in electrical engineering, and with an advanced degree in physics, Uncle Emory was well-suited to the task.
Brian sagged against the wall next to the file cabinets, and shook his head. So that had been the sole reason for all this wasted effort and research—to chase a half-assed ancient myth wrapped in smoke?
He was just about to go and search from William so that the two could leave when the overhead lights flickered and dimmed suddenly, and a humming noise penetrated from the depths, below.
But that wasn’t what sent him sprinting for the basement stairs. Along with the humming noise had come another sound...that of a muffled, agonized human scream cut violently off. |
Taking the stairs to the basement three at a time, Brian leapt to the landing and sprinted down the short concrete corridor leading to another room. After crossing the threshold, Brian found himself in a 20 by 30 room that opened on a long, eight foot wide hallway to his left. Centered on the drab gray wall to his right, he saw a machine that appeared to be a copier. A large silver-gray conduit connected the copier via an apparent electrical line that disappeared into the concrete wall behind it. Standing about four feet high, the machine sat silently. There was no sign of William, and no response after shouting the man’s name several times.
With growing apprehension, Brian turned and crept down the long corridor on the left, following a seemingly endless string of caged lights hanging from the ceiling like imprisoned bats. The tunnel was quite long: about two-thirds the length of a football field. No doors opened off it on either side.
As Brian nervously traveled the tunnel, he called to William repeatedly without success. His voice echoed eerily, sending chills up his spine. He felt claustrophobic, like being in a long train tunnel where at any moment, a locomotive’s screaming whistle would send him sprinting for the far end of the enclosure to safety. With each advancing step, his unease grew.
At the tunnel’s end, he found what was left of William in front of the far wall. The room he entered was dimensionally a mirror image of the first which held the copier, except that here, there was no similar machine. In its place, the wall had been partially covered by a ten foot square sheet of rusty silver metal. No door led from the room.
Near the center of that metal square was the charred, black outline of a human figure with its arms raised in shock or fear. The balding person that had stood in front of the metallic wall had been partially turned in profile. The figure’s back was arched. Whether in pain or fear, Brian didn’t know. The head was craned back and upward, and the mouth was open in a violent scream. There was little doubt that whoever had been standing there had been screaming, because the hands on those extended arms were bent into hooked claws of terror and anguish.
Suddenly, Brian smelled the cloying, heady aroma of burning meat, mingled with the coppery scent of hot blood. A powdery, light gray ash lay piled at the foot of the wall.
At that moment, Brian heard a metallic click followed by a faint hum coming from behind him. Spinning on his heels, he strained to find its source. Squinting his eyes to see the length of the corridor, he saw a narrow widening band of chaotic colors appear just below the top of the copier he’d noticed earlier. As he continued to watch, the horizontal band widened downward.
It was a good thing that Brian’s subconscious mind recognized the danger before his conscious mind did, because it saved his life. Just as the kaleidoscope of crazily zigzagging colors flared like a nova, Brian dove for safety along one side of the rectangular room, which was wider than the tunnel. Behind and above him, a searing beam of multi-colored light slammed into the metal plate covering the wall. The heat was intense, but brief.
After the two second burst, the ceiling lights remained dim, flickering oddly. Only then did Brian make the connection to the dimming lights when he’d been upstairs, earlier.
And then he made another, more frightening but unbelievable connection: his weird experience earlier on the beach with the wave and its unearthly colors yesterday had been a warning. In some unfathomable way, his subconscious mind had known.
Suddenly, he recognized what else the long concrete tunnel and its terminating rectangular rooms reminded him of: the particle acceleration chambers used in experimental physics labs. “Christ,” he whispered. “They actually built the damn thing.”
For several minutes, Brian lay pressed to the floor, too frightened to move. How could he escape the same fate that had taken William? Did he dare risk sprinting down the corridor straight into the jaws of danger? What other choice did he have? Apparently, only one: to cower here, and die of starvation in this stark, gray concrete room.
Even if someone from William’s firm eventually sent a person or persons here looking for the missing men, it would be far too late.
Just as he was about to risk running the corridor, praying that the deadly opening on the machine at the far end of the hallway was shut, he heard a curious shuffling, sucking sound approaching from the far end of the corridor. Occasionally, he heard a light tapping accompany the odd noises. Daring to peek around the edge of the hallway, Brian noted that it was too dark to see anything more than a shadowy form advancing down the corridor.
Hope sprang unbidden, and Brian was about to warn the mysterious figure of the danger when the lights sprang up, and he saw who stood before him less than fifteen feet away. Or rather, he saw who that person had once been.
The ghastly, beast-headed cane clutched in one, claw-like talon by the hideously bent figure’s side removed all doubt about the stranger’s identity. Now, the thing that had once been Brian’s Uncle made no effort to conceal the handle’s ghastly squirmings and writhings.
Too late, the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place in Brian’s terrified mind: the talisman was none other than the cane. And his Uncle had succeeded in opening the gate into that other, unknown dimension with his hellish science. The “Ancient Ones” had wrought horrible changes in the man during his Uncle’s time with them.
“Hello, Nephew,” a hollow voice echoed, “It’s been a long time. I see you’ve come to claim your inheritance.” Brian’s Uncle turned and nodded at what was left of William. “They demanded a sacrifice, you see. I’m glad it wasn’t you who found the way down here first, because I couldn’t have stopped them.”
Then the thing that had once been Brian’s Uncle turned and faced him once again. In a cold, insectile voice devoid of all human emotion, he said, “I have sooooo many wondrous things to show you, dear Nephew. Now we’ll share them together, you and I.”
The eyes freezing Brian in their hellish gaze were inhuman, too. Previously, those orbs had merely been an odd, unsettling gray. Now they gleamed an alien, metallic silver. And they had no pupils.
Uncle Emory’s ghastly metamorphosis didn’t stop there.
As his Uncle’s hunched form lurched towards him, Brian heard an obscene sucking sound, and glanced down at his Uncle’s club foot. The appendage was no longer shod and had grown. Now, it looked like an elephant’s foot grafted onto a man; it had evolved into a hideous pseudopod of amorphous, wobbling flesh that sucked obscenely at the concrete floor with each advancing step.
Backing away further into the room at the tunnel’s end, Brian’s terrified eyes noted that his Uncle’s arms, hands, and legs flexed in ways that a human body should not.
Just before his Uncle backed him into a corner, Brian tripped and fell. Cushioning the fall with his hands, Brian rolled to the right just as his Uncle stooped to clutch his arm. Lashing out reflexively with a leg as he scrambled by, Brian kicked the talisman, knocking it from his Uncle’s hand.
His Uncle did not fall as Brian had hoped. Anchored to the floor by that ghastly, sucking pseudopod foot, his Uncle swayed like a drunken man in a hurricane, and then slowly straightened. When Emory furiously turned to face his nephew, the flesh on his face rippled across its features like sluggish waves on an oily beach. Large seeping boils, pushed up by what lay hidden beneath, pulsed to a rhythm no longer human.
Desperately, Brian crawled to the cane, grabbed it, and scrambled to his feet. Turning to face his Uncle, he brandished the makeshift weapon and screamed, “Keep back, or I’ll club you senseless!”
With his ghastly eyes bulging, Brian’s Uncle reached for his Nephew with clawed, wriggling fingers. “Give me the talisman!” he shrieked. It is of no use to you.”
Brian detected an element of underlying nervousness and fear in his Uncle’s demand that hadn’t been there, before. Suddenly, he sensed that the talisman might be important in some way other than as a physical weapon.
And then a desperate, possible answer came to him.
Turning, Brian sprinted towards the hellish machine at the other end of the corridor, clutching the ghoulish talisman in his grasp. As he ran, the thing wriggled in his hand like an angry snake. More than once, the hideous wolf-like handle turned and tried to bite his hand while slimy appendages sprouted from gashes on its head and flank, whipping the air with ghastly liveliness.
While he ran down that seemingly endless corridor juggling the writhing, deadly talisman, Brian heard the wet, stacatto sound of his Uncle’s pseudopod foot grasping and releasing. Apparently, his Uncle could move about on the unearthly appendage with surprising speed.
“Come back,” his Uncle screamed, “or I’ll call Them out.”
Now halfway down the corridor with his hideous Uncle in close pursuit, Brian heard the beginning of an unearthly chant. Sounds such as the ones echoing eerily in the tunnel were never meant to issue from a human throat.
And the chant was having a potentially deadly effect.
Forty feet in front of him, Brian saw the machine’s panel descending, exposing an increasingly large rectangle of the chaotic, unearthly colors.
And there was something else there, too.
Like a slimy walrus squirming through a hole the size of a dime, a pulsing, squirming, mountainous mass tipped with whipping violet and lime green tentacles was oozing through the front of the machine. Through some trick of complex physics, Brian could see through the wormhole to the other side like looking through a fisheye lens in a door.
Brian screamed repeatedly. For a few brief moments, he was utterly mad.
Legions of ghastly horrors beyond count crowded behind the monstrous behemoth, whose merest tip was already seeping through the gateway. As the horrors milled impatiently, some passed through their brethren like ink through water in their eagerness to breech the threshold and escape the swirling, chaotic maelstrom of their alien dimension.
Somehow, Brian yanked his mind back from the abyss of madness. Putting on a desperate final burst of speed, he screamed and dove to the floor, desperately hurling the talisman at the machine like a spear. Hugging the concrete floor, he heard the deadly hum and felt the sizzling heat from the machine’s blast pass mere inches above his back, scorching hair on the back of his head.
Close behind him, Uncle Emory’s final, desperate scream ended when the beam hit him head-on. Nanoseconds later, the hellish wormhole and the squirming thing wriggling through it collapsed when the talisman hit the machine. The resulting energy clash caused an implosion so violent that Brian found himself being sucked along the floor toward the point of impact. Just four feet from ground zero there was a brief whining, zipping sound.
Then, all fell silent.
Brian lay panting in the dark, too frightened to move. Then, a foul stench wafted to his nostrils. Surely his Uncle couldn’t still be alive, and even now be crawling toward him in the dark? Hugging the floor, Brian inched desperately to the right toward where the exit door should be. Finding it, he felt his way down the short hallway, stumbled up the stairs, and sprinted out the front door of his Uncle’s hellish ranch into blinding sunlight.
During his desperate drive over the rough dirt road leading to the highway and Salt Lake City, Brian fought the urge for reckless speed. Snatching frequent glimpses in his rearview mirror, he half-expected to see some creeping horror in hot pursuit.
Only when he was back on the highway headed north did Brian’s jangled nerves begin to settle. That’s when he realized that his frightening adventure wasn’t finished.
How would he explain to authorities about William Rothchild’s remains at the ranch? Brian’s fingerprints were scattered all over the scene. At the least, he would be a suspect.
In the end Brian was freed without going to trial. Thanks to his inheritance his high-profile, flamboyant defense lawyer Ellsworth DeLaney had argued successfully in pretrial communiqués with the prosecution that it made no sense for Brian to murder a representative of the firm whose efforts had made him a multimillionaire.
Another item leading to Brian’s freedom was the gray ash that Brian knew to be Rothchild’s remains. The powdery substance puzzled forensic personnel so completely that they could not even conclude the ash was human. Without a body, the prosecution’s position relied solely on circumstantial evidence.
But it was the discovery of a third set of unique fingerprints at the ranch that collapsed the prosecution’s case, setting Brian free. Brian’s lawyer pointed out that a person or persons unknown hiding at the ranch might have surprised Rothchild, murdered him, and smuggled the body away to be disposed of elsewhere. The third set of finger prints were never traced to a known person. The physical anomalies of those mysterious prints left experts who had examined them baffled and deeply unnerved.
Brian knew to whom the unknown prints belonged, but he kept the hideous truth to himself. |
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