The Mummies of Blogspace9
by Willian Doonan
www.williamdoonan.com
Text copyright © 2013 William Doonan
For Carmen
And with special appreciation to Bob Bernstein, Dan Stuelpnagel, Carole Avila, and Bill Rozell, for reading and rereading.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Leon Samples
Michelle Cavalcante
Bruce Wheeler
Cyrus Sanderson
Hacienda Segovia
Kim Castillo
Archive of the Indies
Vasco Cuellar
Radu
Rafael Duran
Pyramid at Segovia
Melchor Negromonte
Imp
Sopay
Naya
Blogspace9
Flamenco Melchor
Simón Bolivar
Alcazar of Seville
Gaspar Quiroga
Sebastiano Gota
July 3, 2011
Cupertino, CA
Administrator
http://www.admin.blogspace9.ex
note: sequence interrupted -
this communication was posted 23 days after project initiation
Urgent communication to Dr. Bruce Wheeler: although your GPS software has been disabled in your attempt to avoid incarceration, please recall that you did just identify your location on a public blog.
In our ongoing effort to ensure the success of this project, and our concern for project personnel, we are herein notifying you that we have intercepted three communications from Seville to Rota that mention you and/or the killing of you.
The first call was made six minutes ago from a coded line in the Seville police department to the mobile phone of Tio Regalado, the gypsy patriarch of a Rota-based heroin distribution organization. Your death, and the contents of the house on Soledad Street for half a million euros, was the offer.
The second call, after Tio Regalado ran the offer by his captains, was from Melchor Negromonte, the gypsy patriarch of the Triana Gitano Capitano, a Seville-based criminal enterprise. Negromonte ordered Regalado to refuse the offer and provide you with security and safe haven.
The third call, which is only now just concluding, was direct from a landline in the old harem in the Seville Alcazar to Angelino Logoreci, an Albanian capo who controls most of the gun running in southern Spain, and who owns a beach house in Rota. Your death, and the contents of the house on Soledad Street for a million euros, was the offer. Contract accepted.
While estimates of Logoreci’s manpower and capacity for rapid asset mobilization are still being processed, you should anticipate hostiles on scene within seven to ten minutes.
Leon Samples
age:
28
occupation:
archaeology graduate student
education:
M.A. Yale University - historical archaeology
personal:
single
hometown:
Philadelphia, PA
hobbies:
vintage birthing forceps
food/bev:
fajitas/rum
life goal:
become one with Kim Castillo
fav movie:
Terminator II
obscurity:
raised in foster care
July 29, 2012
Segovia, Peru
Leon Samples
http://www.greatbigLeon.blogspace9.ex
note: sequence interrupted -
this communication was posted 414 days after project initiation
That last entry, July 3, 2011 - that was a watershed moment for me. That’s when I realized it had all gone to hell, and us with it. Sure, we pulled it together in the end. But we paid a high price.
The time period described in this blog spans barely seven weeks, but they were the densest weeks of my life. Had I known at the onset that seven weeks later most of my friends would be dead, I would have left Peru in a heartbeat. But of course I didn’t know that.
None of us knew what was at stake. And that’s the thing about archaeology - you never know what’s going to turn up once you start digging into an ancient pyramid. Maybe some burials, mummies even. But surely not a five-hundred-year-old secret worth killing for.
Seriously, if you told me 414 days ago that a demonically-possessed Spanish Grand Inquisitor had sponsored an archaeological excavation to find a horde of stolen Inca gold, I would have bought you a drink and shared a laugh.
If you then told me that a pair of undead conquistador knights would ultimately help us find an ancient book containing the secret to putting down walking mummies, I would have punched you in the face and had another drink. But I wouldn’t be laughing anymore.
And if you finished up by telling me that something was watching from inside that pyramid, some malevolent force that could animate the dead, I’d probably punch you again, or maybe have a third drink. I don’t know what I would do. We’ve never had that conversation.
But it’s all true, as you’ll come to realize. I’ve left the storyline alone, so you can read the actual posts, day by day, as it all unfolded, spitting us out into a reality nobody expected. I have plenty of time on my hands, so I’ve taken the liberty of cobbling together a timeline, and providing some background information on the members of our team.
It all ends badly, by the way. I understand now that I’ll never leave this pyramid, and I understand why. My name is Leon Samples. I am twenty-eight years old, and I am damned.
Timeline
1532
Battle of Cajamarca; Cuellar & Duran hide Inca gold in pyramid
1533
Duran imprisoned
1550
Cuellar ordained
1578
Cuellar founds church at Segovia
1580
Sebastiano Gota arrives in Peru; work on Malleus Momias begins
1582
Cuellar imprisoned by Quiroga; Sebastiano and Naya brought into pyramid
1738
Duran recovers his share of gold from pyramid
1831
Sebastiano takes the rest of the gold from pyramid
Michelle Cavalcante
age:
32
occupation:
archaeologist, field director, Segovia, Peru
education:
Ph.D. Yale University - historical archaeology - colonial Peru
personal:
engaged to Bruce Wheeler, previously engaged to Marcus Steubens (deceased), skilled in computer programming
hometown:
New London, Connecticut
hobbies:
yoga/swimming
food/bev:
sushi/Long Island Iced Tea
life goal:
rule large part of world
fav movie:
Aliens
obscurity:
as a doctoral student, participated in the excavation of the Malefiz house in Bamberg, Germany, where suspected witches were detained and interrogated in late 16th century
June 10, 2011
Segovia, Peru
Michelle Cavalcante
http://www.diggirl.Blogspace9.ex
voice activation mode: enabled
indiv 1: Guys, let’s do this, please, while the generators are running. According to the conditions of our contract, we should have been recording since day one, and we’re already four months into excavations. Leon, can you put the guinea pig down? That’s food, not a pet. And if you could stop staring at Kim for maybe two seconds, we could get this done.
indiv 2: I happen to like this guinea pig, and I’m not staring at anyone. I’m a victim of th
e design of my human eyes. They respond to stimulus; it’s nothing more than rods and cones at work. When something tasty crosses my path, my optic nerves respond, pure and simple. But when something as smoking hot as Kim Castillo crosses the room, I’ll be honest, it’s mostly just the rods.
indiv 1: Fine, but our funding is conditional on maintaining, and I shall read you the requirement here - a regular, updated, engaging, and public blog of our activities. So we’ll begin by introducing ourselves. I’m going to start typing now, and then we’re each going to have a turn.
indiv 2: It looks like it started without you, Michelle. Life is like that sometimes. All you can do is jump in.
indiv 1: Shut up, Leon. OK, somehow the voice recognition thing is on. And with you already slurring your words, this isn’t going well.
voice activation mode: disabled
Greetings, blogosphere! As we archaeologists are fond of saying, context is everything, so here’s some: My name is Michelle Cavalcante. I am an archaeologist. I have the great fortune of working as field director for the greatest archaeologist in the world, Professor Cyrus Sanderson, who is currently asleep on the sofa.
I’m writing from the north coast. That’s Peru to those of you who desire a more complete geographical reference, but to those in the know, it’s just the north coast. We’re five hours north of Lima on bad roads, but it could be the end of the earth or another planet for all of the traffic we get. We’re living in a nice house, in a not-so-nice impoverished land-reform town, at the edge of a coastal desert.
Drive about an hour through the cane fields and you’ll reach the Panamerican highway. There’s a town there, where you can buy just about anything you want, as long as you only want cigarettes, beer, rice, chickens, rum, or pirated CDs. So in a nutshell, we’re extremely isolated, and we have absolutely everything we need to run an effective archaeological project.
In truth, we would have gotten this blog started sooner except for the fact that our generator has been so seriously on the blink that we barely have refrigeration. But other than that, things are rocking along.
We are four months into the excavation of a colonial hamlet established here by Spanish priests in 1578. It’s not much more than a tiny church, about two dozen houses, and some enclosures for animals. But what’s really interesting about this little hamlet is that the priests built it right in front of an ancient mud-brick pyramid.
And this, my friends, is one strange pyramid. It’s about thirty meters high and it looks like a drippy sandcastle, something Antoni Gaudi built on a bad day, in the rain, while detoxing. It’s an old pyramid. It was old when the Incas came here in about 1500, and it was even older when the priests came seventy-eight years later. Leon thinks it’s haunted, but he’s not very bright.
We’ve been focusing most of our attention on the little church ruins...
LEON HERE - Hate to INTERRUPT, I do, but sometimes it becomes necessary. This place is haunted as fuck, and Michelle knows it as well as anyone. Ask her about the shuffling zombies that patrol at night, or the howling ghosts that wake us up sure as any alarm clock might. At dinner time, the banshees wail. Actually none of that is precisely true, but there is something truly demonic going on here. I haven’t put my finger on it yet, but I will. That being said, I’m going to give the laptop back to Michelle so that I can resume my Kim staring. OK, I’M GIVING THE LAPTOP BACK TO MICHELLE.
Thank you for that, Leon. We scientists are truly fond of superstitious nonsense, really. So it’s a blessing that you are among us.
As I was saying, we’ve been focussing most of our attention on the church. Little remains of it except a few wall segments from the central nave and part of the sacristy. But we archaeologists are in the business of digging, and dig we have done. We’re down underneath the altar now, and underneath part of the sacristy, and damn if we haven’t found actual pieces of paper. This is exactly what we were hoping for; the writings, letters, maybe even diaries, of the priests who came here in 1578.
Imagine why that is important, won’t you? To have a firsthand account of what it was like to try to convert the natives, not the whitewashed version that was sent home to Spain. No, this is going to change history. That’s what we’re doing here, changing history.
So we find our writings, our letters, etc., then we scan them and send them off to our project historian, Bruce Wheeler, who just yesterday headed off to work at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, to see if he can orient our findings to some broader historical context. And just because it’s worth mentioning - there have long been rumors of a pile of Inca gold that was hidden somewhere around here by the conquistadors. So hey, maybe we’ll find that too.
So now that I’ve shared our adventures, I’ll take a moment to introduce our cast of nine characters:
1) me - Michelle Cavalcante - field director
2) Bruce Wheeler, our historian, my true love, who is working the archival end of things in Seville, Spain
3) Leon Samples, our lab director
4) Cyrus Sanderson, our fearless leader
5) Kim Castillo, our crew chief
and…and we haven’t identified the other four yet, but give us time.
This is as good a point as any to thank the good folks at Blogspace9 who are generously funding our excavations, and providing some seriously high-end computer equipment.
Blogspace9 is a startup blogging/social networking site. It’s unique in that it allows a core group of nine peers to remain in nearly constant contact, and to communicate across an integrated series of platforms. You’ve probably heard about it, and about us. We were featured in all their initial advertisements. You remember - the ones with the photo of Cyrus standing in front of the pyramid, with the headline Famous Archaeologist to Investigate the Mysteries of Segovia. Boy, was Cyrus mad about that! It’s always important to read the fine print before you sign something.
In any case, it was Blogspace9 who courageously interceded when our excavation permits were cancelled at the last minute. Although we have every reason to believe that those permits were cancelled because we initially refused to accept Blogspace9’s funding (mostly because we are archaeologists, and not very much interested in social networking experiments) Blogspace9 convinced the ministry of culture to issue those permits in exchange for us agreeing to work with Blogspace9.
So that’s my story for now. I should go. Cyrus just woke up and is either feverish or in the grip of more delirium tremens. More tomorrow. - Michelle
Bruce Wheeler
age:
31
occupation:
historian
education:
Ph.D. Yale University - colonial Peruvian history
personal:
engaged to Michelle Cavalcante
hometown:
Cincinnati, Ohio
hobbies:
banjo
food/bev:
salmon/chardonnay
life goal:
endowed professorship, marriage, family
fav movie:
Love Story
obscurity:
fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and Klingon, expert on colonial policy and conversions in 16th and 17th century Peru
June 11, 2011
Seville, Spain
Bruce Wheeler
http://www.historyismine.Blogspace9.ex
Feels like just yesterday I was in Peru. Wait, I was. I’m horribly jet-lagged. We’re supposed to introduce ourselves, that’s what lovely Michelle told me, so here goes: Bruce Wheeler here, Dr. Bruce Wheeler, Ph.D., under-employed historian extraordinaire, temporarily in service to the great Cyrus Sanderson. And I am writing to you from beautiful Seville, Spain.
It’s hot as hell here. I just had my lunch at a little restaurant by the Archive, a little filet of pork with spinach and garbanzo beans. Absolutely delicious! I haven’t had pork filets since that night at the cabin, Michelle, when we were celebrating the one month anniversary of the first time we�
�we…, you know, I’m not used to this blog thing yet. It’s so public. I guess that’s the point, right? There is a story to be told here, and all of us have a part in telling it. But nine bloggers, Michelle? You think this is a story to be told by nine bloggers? Why couldn’t someone start a site called Blogspace3?
I’m not even convinced that Cyrus is going to chime in. Unless there’s a peer-reviewed publication in the works, Cyrus won’t even write a laundry list. Oh nuts, he’s going to read this, isn’t he? This isn’t like one of our regular e-mails where I can just dump on him.
Just kidding. Love you, Cyrus, prince among men and all that. By the way, that Blogspace9 ad with your photo is over here too. I picked up the International Herald and saw your big face on the last page. Seriously though, I am truly grateful for the job. Without you, I’d be selling tube socks under a bridge, and Michelle would leave me for someone with nobler prospects.
Back to my day. After lunch, I walked down to the center of the old town, admiring the great cathedral, and the Giralda Tower reaching up to God. And next door, one of the greatest buildings in the world to a historian - the Archive of the Indies. I took a moment to catch my breath.
This was once the Council of the Indies, as you know, the nexus of all exploration in the new world. This building is where exploration permits were written, where trade licenses were negotiated, and where treasure and plunder were recorded. For a short time, this building would have been the center of the world. Now it’s the Archive.
Thanks to my sterling paperwork, my letters of recommendation, Cyrus’s missive to the minister, my excellent Spanish language speaking ability, my impeccable posture and winning smile, I am now a registered investigator at the Archive of the Indies. Investigator #00219222 at your service. I’m told that the first two digits of the license are the most important. The double 00s, as we elite investigators refer to ourselves, are the only ones permitted to carry firearms. We double 00s are looked up to with respect and envy by all the other investigators. Actually, I made that part up.
The Mummies of Blogspace9 Page 1