by Joanne Pence
Jianjun scarcely believed his eyes. The journal contained the same symbol Michael had found in Mongolia.
Jianjun continued to read.
Jefferson dispatched to the Medieval scholar a finely wrought drawing of the symbol. He foreswore mention of the Gold.
The man replied with clear excitement, saying the symbol was from the selfsame Alchemical text he had spoken of, the one that taught the sorcerer Nicolas Flamel the Art of Transmutation.
In Great Secret, Jefferson gathered our little group with Captain Crouch as our leader. We were given one Mission: to go to the locale where the Alchemical symbol had been found, and bring back all that was there, including the Gold.
He then organized the Corps of Discovery which would be led by Captains William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. Our duty was to follow them. Of course, it could not become General Knowledge that Jefferson was spending the Public Treasury for our Mystical adventure. Thus, we were dispatched in complete secret from everyone we knew and from all we held dear on this Earth.
I can little convey the excitement with which our most Remarkable expedition set out. My particular friend, Noah Handy, was well versed in the study of Astrology and the Heavens. He entertained us with Numerous stories about the Stars and their meaning. Reuben Hale was an older man, perhaps in his fifties, and I feared for his Health on this journey. He was a devotee of Medieval sorcery and knew a great deal about cures and potions. I found him amiable, but strange. I will confess to little amity with Orril and Asa Munroe, who were first cousins, and who professed to be practitioners of Mentalist Powers. They held themselves as Superior to me in every way simply because they were skilled Hunters and Frontiersmen. I found their constant prying about my Thoughts and ridicule of my Weakness as destructive to our mission, and often wished they would leave the group. I feared their hearts were corrupted by Vice and Arrogance.
I shall admit, although I enjoy good health, I am not as physically strong as most men for I have spent the majority of my twenty-eight years in the pursuit of knowledge. I am a writer. I have published several books on the Occult, not as a believer, but as a scholar. The books sold only passably well in our practical America, but I have a devoted following in England. The public there are especially curious to learn of the beliefs and practices of the American aboriginals. Mine was to be one of the first learned books on the subject when we returned.
I shall not recount here, as we followed Lewis and Clark, of our troubles with the fiercesome Lakota Sioux, or of the hardships of our first Winter on the plains. Suffice it to say that without our Guides, Eli Borah and Miles Weiser, fine men with good knowledge of survival in the Implacable Wilderness, we would be long dead.
Instead, I shall proceed forward to the fateful day when Noah Handy peered through his spyglass and saw that Captain Clark was separating from Captain Lewis, who seemed to be in ill Health. By this time, we believed we must be near the Nez Perce land, for we had traveled far longer without falling off the edge of the continent than we imagined was possible. We looked forward to achieving our Goal and returning Home.
I longed for Home. My own Susannah Revere, the truest, most honorable woman I have been privileged to meet, had promised her hand to me before I left Maryland. I vowed that after I returned, I would never again leave her side.
Upon Captain Crouch’s order, we followed William Clark and his small band. I should have known, as soon as we entered this strange Land, that something was dreadfully amiss. The mountains, tall, and blood-red at sunset as a Beast’s maw, stretched farther than I ever imagined they would, and were far more Barren and Inhospitable. We were at such an altitude the Air was thin and we struggled to breath.
If the land our Ancestors had found in the New World had been as empty and forbidding as this, with murderous aboriginals and monstrous, ferocious bears called Grizzlies whose roar caused men to fall to the ground quaking in terror, they never would have settled it, but would have fled back to England and kissed the ground with gratitude for their deliverance.
Our group was forced to lag some distance behind Captain Clark because we knew Scouts would travel between his camp and that of Captain Lewis. For the first time, we were unable to simply follow the trail the Corps of Discovery had created, because to do so would have placed us in the path of the Scouts. We were forced to blaze our own trail.
And that was our Undoing.
To keep clear of the Scouts, we traveled far to the South.
The second night, dry Lightning continued into the early morning hours, and we awoke to a Sky yellow with smoke. The forest blazed, and Fire progressed toward our camp with terrifying rapidity as if it were some great Hellish demon devouring all in its wake.
The next day, we traveled south to avoid the path of the rapidly approaching blaze.
We reached a deep canyon. The gorge precipitously yawned straight down, and was impossible to descend. We were forced westward, following the gorge, and hoping to find a way across. Once the fire diminished, we would circumambulate back to regain Captain Clark's trail.
As we continued, however, hope of finding our way back to Clark diminished, and should the fire be burning toward him, we knew not if he would be able to return to Lewis, or if he would perish in the hellish flames.
That night we had recourse to prayer, a remarkable thing for men who had turned our backs on the One God of our fathers, and had in truth lived most of our lives in search of other, more Aesthetically pleasing, more Rational and Modern deities.
The Fire galloped at great speed with strength and endurance. We ran, but it pursued, jumping boundaries and heading our way like a ravenous monster in search of nourishment.
We crossed a wide creek only to watch in dismay as the fire vaulted over it. Was there no safety from this monster? We could see the crown of it, with flames higher than a hundred feet into the sky.
The blaze created a clime of its own. Furious temperatures sucked the heated air into a column where updrafts whorled smoke into a vertical cloud.
We could only shake our heads in frightful wonderment as we watched in helpless awe at the power of nature and prayed that we not be consumed within its cavernous maw.
After four days, we wondered if it would ever end. By the eighth day, temperatures lowered and the moisture in the air increased contrary to the usually blistering dryness of this climate. With this change, the rate of combustion slowed.
The following morning, cloud edges had darkened to a gentle gray, and by noon, a steady drizzle had become a drumming rain. Trees and rocks grew cooler. By the next day, almost an inch of rain had fallen.
Like a giant beast that is spent, the fire burned itself out as we slept.
As the overhead lights flickered on and off a couple of times, Jianjun slowly returned to this time and place. The Institute was about to close.
He slid the journal into the fake bottom in his laptop computer case, the same secret compartment that held lock picks, key cards, SIM cards, and other tools of his trade. He returned the boxes of materials to the librarian, then calmly walked through security and out the museum doors. As he tried to put the pieces of a nightmare puzzle together, he wondered how the journal had been ignored. Had it been dismissed by hasty readers as crazed fiction? A frontier tall tale? And he wondered who else had read it.
Chapter 19
SOMETHING WAS TERRIBLY wrong here, Michael thought as he perused the rugged terrain. The emptiness, untouched by man, seemed to go on forever.
The previous day the group found nothing that could lead to the pillars. At first light, they began again.
They stopped when they reached a location where the mountain dropped away. They couldn’t see through the thick, high foliage to the bottom. Something about it seemed familiar to Michael, however. He had never been there before, yet it welcomed him.
“This is it,” he said quietly. “We’ve got to climb down the mountain.”
“What makes you say that?” Quade’s dark gaze fixed on Michael.
“I don’t know,” Michael admitted.
Jake and Charlotte exchanged worried glances. “Good enough for me,” Charlotte said. Jake nodded.
Michael led them forward as anticipation, hope and fear collided. The possibility that Lionel and the students were already dead, that he was chasing shadows, weighed heavily.
He realized the mountain’s relentless steepness and treacherous footing would only increase the farther they went. They left the horses on a flat pasture near a small stream, removed the saddlebags and filled their backpacks with as much as they could carry, then crawled and slid down the mountainside.
Michael stared into the distance with both satisfaction and alarm. In the center of a long valley stood two pillars, taller and more frighteningly unearthly than any of them ever imagined.
o0o
As they hiked toward the pillars, Jake found footprints among the crushed scrub. “Look at this! They were here!” Joy filled him.
Michael said nothing. He had somehow known he would find the pillars, had known they would find evidence that the university group had been here. He felt as if he had been led here by a force beyond himself, but by who or what, for good or evil, he had no idea.
He had turned his back on believing in such sixth senses, turned his back on everything other than the here and now, the real and concrete…until Mongolia.
“I've got to call this in.” Jake pulled out his satellite phone. “I want a search team out here pronto.” He tried the phone. “Damn! There's nothing but static. I've never had that happen before. What could be causing interference way out here?” He walked back some distance to see if he could get a better signal.
Charlotte followed him, unsure why since she found being near him strangely unsettling yet somehow comforting. She also sensed that on some level he enjoyed having her near. She stopped and called out, “Does it work yet?”
“No. For all I know, the damn thing's broken. But I've got backup.” Jake dropped the phone back in its case and took out a satellite messenger, capable of sending a distress signal with the sender's location. It was as dead as the phone.
Michael reached for his sat phone. It had never failed him. Besides, he should have already contacted Jianjun, told him where he was, and asked him to be ready to send help if things grew any weirder.
He tried to find a signal, but his device also refused to connect. The pillars had to be the cause. But why? What did they do? What was their purpose?
He returned the phone to his backpack. They were on their own.
“Before we waste time with this technical junk,” Jake said, “let's see if we can find those kids and give them food and first aid. After that, we'll figure out how to get a helicopter out here. The kids’ tracks are heading straight for the pillars, so they might be camped nearby.”
“This is all beyond weird,” Charlotte said, noting the quiet all around them. The isolation unnerved her.
“We will understand the strangeness as soon as we learn what's causing it,” Quade stated in his usual emotionless, cerebral manner.
Michael, however, saw perfection in the symmetry of the straight, matching dark gray posts atop the pyramid-like hill. They reminded him of Miyajima in Japan's Inland Sea, where a tall vermilion gate, a torii, had been built so that at high tide water surrounded it. Beautiful and symmetrical, the torii was considered a gateway between the physical and spiritual world. A gate in such an unlikely location made it startling to behold. Just like the two pillars.
He saw footprints leading to the pillars, but none away.
The air grew colder as he neared the pillars, and then a bolt of lightning streaked across the sky and a boom of thunder sounded.
“What was that?” Charlotte stopped short.
“It seemed to come from them,” Jake said. He, too, froze in his tracks.
Once more, lightning flashed above the pillars and thunder rumbled. Jake and Charlotte moved together, but didn’t speak.
“People nearing the pillars must create a displacement of air,” Quade said, “like wind booming through a cave.”
“Wait!” Michael held out his arms as if to stop them. “The thunder could be a warning to stay away.”
“Now you're out in Twilight Zone territory,” Jake declared. “It’s dry lightning and thunder. Happens now and again, and I'm not letting it stop me from going where I please. Or from finding those kids! I say ignore it. Let’s go.”
“All of you talk about the noise, but what about the lights?” Michael asked.
The others glanced at each other. “What lights?” Jake said.
“Those!” Michael pointed at the ground from the foot of the mound to the top. “Don’t you see them? They’re fantastic, like intricate Celtic knots all jumbled together, and yet, overall, they form a large-scale pattern, a definite pattern that works its way up the mound to the pillars.”
“I sure as hell don’t see any lights,” Jake said, staring at him as if he’d lost his mind.
Charlotte and Quade moved a bit closer, hoping to see the same thing as Michael. He could tell from their expressions they saw nothing.
“I know what I see!” Michael hurried a few steps forward then dropped to the ground and scooped away bits of dirt, eventually ending up with a small hole. He sat back on his heels. “They won’t go away. They aren’t on the earth; not in the earth. They’re of the earth.”
“What you are seeing is an array,” Quade said calmly. “It holds and focuses energy. However those pillars came to be here, they are held in place by energy. For some reason, you alone can see it.”
“See energy?” Jake cast a beady eye on both Quade and Michael. “Sounds like witchcraft. Which, I hasten to add, I also do not believe in.” He marched forward, Charlotte and then Quade close behind while Michael followed.
When they reached the foot of the mound, lightning flashed and thunder boomed every sixty to ninety seconds. Static electricity charged the air.
Michael walked away, while Quade sat cross-legged gazing up at the formation.
“Now, what the hell's he doing?” Jake muttered to Charlotte.
She shook her head, too stunned by the pillars themselves to bother about Quade. She moved closer to Jake. “Remember how I told you I studied ancient Egypt? I hate to say it, but now that we’re close, those symbols at the top are Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
“You’ve studied hieroglyphics??” Jake rubbed his chin, looking at her with equal parts awe and befuddlement as a dopey grin spread over his face. He had never met anyone like her, and as much as he tried to ignore the feelings she caused in him, he couldn’t. “At this point I’m ready to believe anything. Can you read them?”
“Not without my books and dictionaries.”
He forced his attention back to the problem at hand. “So, now you’re telling me ancient Egyptians, the guys who built the pyramids, were once here in Idaho?”
“No.”
“That’s good,” Jake sounded relieved, as if he had feared for her sanity.
“The stones would be more weathered, and the ground much more reclaimed if these were thousands of years old. They’re much more recent.”
“That’s it!” Jake said. “It’s a prank! Some college kids rigged this up. Maybe even as a joke on the visiting professor. Now, you’re talking.”
Much to her surprise in this crazy situation, Charlotte found herself smiling at him. “I should have said recent, archeologically speaking.” A glimmer filled her eyes “They’re probably no more than two or three hundred years old.”
“Good God!” Jake groaned.
Michael hurried toward them. “There’s a problem.” He beckoned Quade to join them. “I walked all the way around the mound and I saw footprints going up, but none coming down or walking away from it.”
“Impossible,” Jake said.
Charlotte said nothing as she tried to understand all this.
“There's an explanation.” Quade’s tone was firm, all-knowing.
&nbs
p; “What, they flew?” Jake put his hands on his hips. He’d had it with Quade’s arrogance. “I know the old legends talked about people disappearing, but I don't buy it!”
Quade peered up at the pillars. “If we want to find the students, we’ll have to follow them.” His frosty gaze turned to Jake. “The wisest move might be that you don't join us, Sheriff,” Quade said. “We don’t know what’s on the other side.”
“Other side of what?” Jake asked.
Michael answered. “That’s what we need to find out.” He felt drawn to the pillars, compelled to go nearer to them.
“Are you the only sensible one here, Charlotte?” Jake asked.
His question churned in her mind. Sensible? If it was sensible to believe these pillars held answers about her husband, then she was. After thirteen years of not knowing why he died, what he pursued those last few weeks of his life, the answer seemed to be within her grasp. “I’m going with them,” she replied softly.
Despite her words, he saw her fear, and it burned inside him. He hated that she was afraid, hated that she was anything but safe and happy. He faced the others. “I think you’ve all lost your goddamn minds,” he yelled, far too gruffly. His gaze met Charlotte’s as he said, “I’m not letting you go anywhere without me.”
Quade climbed up the mound first, Charlotte next, Michael, and then Jake. As they neared the top, the booms struck with less frequency rather than more, and then stopped completely.
The earth at the top was the same as the earth everywhere else on the mound. They found no hole that could swallow people up. Nothing.
And yet, they could not deny that footprints rose up to the pillars, but none descended from them.
In the center, between the two pillars, Michael saw a glow. He thought of Lady Hsieh and the certainty struck that through the pillars, he would find her. “I’m going to walk between the pillars,” he said. “But before anyone else does, you should realize there’s a possibility you won’t be able to come back.”