First they’d seen one stone. Then another, maybe twenty feet past it.
And after moving past a few intervening trees, they’d seen the rest: two long lines of huge stones bisecting the clearance. The lines were parallel with fifty feet or so between them. The stones themselves were taller than broad — rock fingers, not squat round boulders.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Piper said.
“I have.”
Cameron hopped off his horse. He uncoiled the braided rope and tied his mount to one of the last trees before woods gave way to grass and slowly walked forward, as if in a trance.
Piper had lost a lot of her bearings but thought the freeway was still somewhere to her right and they were facing west, directly through this clearing. They’d just stopped, and if they were truly facing a week of travel, she wanted to keep moving. But fascinating geology was apparently, for Cameron, worth stopping for. Maybe he’d take their picture to share online if the network ever returned.
Piper reluctantly hopped down, tied off, and came to Cameron’s side.
“Should we keep moving?”
“Have you ever been here?” he asked, not looking toward her. “Meyer’s house isn’t that far, but it’s not like there are any roads. Did you ever hike through this area?”
“I’d never been to Colorado at all before we came to the ranch.”
Cameron moved slowly forward. He ran his hand along the surface of one rock then knelt at its base. He dragged his fingers along the dirt at its foot where the ground was buckled, like a bunched-up carpet. Grass bulged in odd lumps in a rough circle around all of the stones’ bases as far as Piper could see.
“Why?” she asked, watching him.
“I was wondering if it’s always been here.”
“There are all sorts of weird rock things around here.”
Cameron continued to play in the dirt. Looking at the wavelike rings of raised grass at the bottom.
“These were placed here recently.” He stood. “All of them.”
“Okay.”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“A bunch of rocks? No. They don’t bother me.”
Cameron ran his hand along the stone. “This is granite. It’s probably three hundred tons.”
“You know a lot about rock weights.”
“I’ve seen them before, I told you.” He backed away then looked up at Piper. “We need to go around.”
“Around?” She looked to the right and left, watching the line of rocks stretch to the clearing’s edge and beyond. The line of stone went as far as she could see. “Don’t be silly. It’s clear here, and you can walk right between them.”
Shaking his head, Cameron pointed to the rippled ground. “You see that?” They’d tip over if they weren’t half buried, so there’s as much stone below ground as above. But there’s no loose dirt, and the ground looks almost broken. Like … well, like they were just pounded in.”
Piper wasn’t buying it. Maybe there was a fault line here or something. She vaguely remembered hearing that just as some faults in the Earth’s crust made big cracks, other overlaps of the tectonic plates made mountains. They were in the mountains, places where rock erupted upward. It was much easier to believe that these rocks had risen like jagged teeth than that someone had dragged them here, into the middle of the woods, where there wasn’t much room for cranes or heavy equipment. Strange-looking for sure, but nature was full of logic-defying crap.
“Fascinating,” said Piper. “Ready to move on?”
“We need to go around. Come on.” Cameron remounted his horse and began moving parallel to the stones. The clearing was large, but he nudged his horse to a canter and made it in under a minute. Piper followed, and they found themselves where the trees resumed. But the rock lines didn’t stop. They continued into the woods, now wedged between trees, their positioning precise in the clearing, but their newness now obvious. Tree roots, driven down by the stone’s force, erupted around their edges, creating giant, gaping soil caves around a few.
“Come on,” said Cameron, continuing to ride parallel to the stones.
Now that they were inside the woods, the air was cooler and darker, the rising sun dampened by the leaves above. Piper felt her skin crawling and felt stupid. Cameron’s mood and the stone formation’s oddity blended to give her the creeps. But that wasn’t reasonable. Someone had wedged a bunch of enormous stone spears into the dirt, driving through tree roots as big around as her thighs … and, in at least one case, directly through a fallen tree, splintering the trunk into a mess of pale-brown splinters around the planted stone. So what?
“Dead end.” Cameron pointed to where the path descended into a treacherous valley. They wouldn’t be going down there. But, Piper saw, the stones did. Evenly spaced in twin rows all the way down and back up the other side, out of sight. He nodded. “We’ll have to try the other way.”
“This is ridiculous, Cameron. Let’s just … ”
Piper moved to steer her horse between the stones.
Cameron raised his hand to protest and opened his mouth to yell — the way a parent might shout at a child about to run headlong into a busy street. But Cameron barely managed a yelp, because her horse balked before he could yell, whinnying and rearing onto her hind legs. It wasn’t much more than a frightened hop, and Piper managed to stay on, but the horse continued to whine and protest even after she’d bent forward and clutched the animal’s neck. She watched its big, brown eyes dart toward the stones, terrified.
“Easy, girl!” Piper ran her hand along the horse’s neck as it pranced back from the stones.
The danger passed, Cameron lowered his hands.
“The other way,” he repeated.
Piper turned the horse with some difficulty; her mount only moved after she allowed enough distance from the stones. Cameron followed.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “my dad dragged me all over the world. All these crazy places where there were all sorts of funny things to look at. Like Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, where a shepherd found a rock sticking out of the dirt one day and decided to dig and ended up unearthing the first corner of some sort of huge underground city that appears to have been deliberately buried: stone megaliths much fancier than these and elaborate sculptures of animals, all precisely carved something like twelve thousand years ago. Twice as long ago as we’d previously believed human civilization existed. But there were so many more places like that. That’s where I spent my childhood: trotting the globe, looking at rocks.”
Piper turned to the massive stones. Now that they were back in the sun, they just seemed like rocks. But she couldn’t help recall the horse’s panicked eye, the animal’s obvious terror.
“There are stone circles everywhere — ‘stone henges’ all over Europe in addition to the famous Stonehenge in England. Sacsayhuamán in Peru, where enormous stones are arranged like Tetris blocks, so precisely fitted, without mortar to hold them together, that you couldn’t slide a piece of paper between them. But what this makes me think of most,” Cameron pointed at the rocks as they rode past, “is Carnac, in France.”
“Carnac,” Piper repeated, with no idea what he meant.
“Enormous granite megaliths, just like these. Several hundred tons each, standing upright in long rows. They’re dated between 4,500 and 2,500 BC, toward the end of the Stone Age, so we’re talking about cavemen doing the work.”
“So they lined up rocks. Terrifying.”
“Not terrifying,” said Cameron, refusing the bait, “but strange. First, how did they move stones that large? They’d be hard to move today. Local legend says that giants built it. Beings with strength enough that moving the stones was easy. But that’s not even the most amazing part. The stones seem to be placed randomly, but they’re not. The rows are all exactly 2,860 meters long, and 1,430 meters across the whole formation at the end. A one-to-two ratio, in a right triangle. When you see it from above, it’s obvious. Understanding of the Pythagorean theorem th
ousands of years before Pythagorus was born. And also, it’s one of the only man-made sites that can be seen from space.”
“Convenient.” With part of Piper’s mind, she thought it ironic that her skepticism about some sort of “aliens did it” theory was intact even after aliens had invaded the planet and stolen her husband. Maybe it was repression. It almost had to be. There was no question the rocks beside her hadn’t been placed by nature. And there was no question they hadn’t been placed recently from above, with enormous force.
Cameron nodded. “That’s what I used to think. The problem with so much of the stuff I was dragged around the planet to see is that nobody started with the evidence. They started with the theory to explain the evidence. That’s not the way science is supposed to work. You’re supposed to make a hypothesis then try to disprove the query. You’re not supposed to decide on something you want to believe then search for substantiation. Because you can find patterns in everything.”
“Like Orion’s belt,” said Piper, remembering what he’d said back in the bunker.
“Right.” He nodded forward. “This way.”
They reentered the woods, this time on the opposite end of the clearing. But after a few minutes, they confronted an impassable valley — probably the same one, curving around from side to side like a horseshoe.
Cameron swore.
“Finding another way around will cost us hours.”
“They’re just rocks,” Piper said. “The horses may be afraid of rocks, but I’m not. We can blindfold them and lead them through.”
“But that’s just it. I don’t think they are just rocks anymore.”
“‘Anymore’?” Piper wasn’t sure what she was hearing. If the huge gray slabs beside them weren’t rocks, what were they? Sock puppets?
Cameron moved his mount toward Piper then clipped a line to the horse’s bridle and tossed it to her.
“Hold this for a sec.” He hopped down then stood beside Piper and her horse, not approaching.
“People who visit Carnac,” he said, “say they can feel energy there. You know, like crystal weirdos who say that vibrations in the crystals heal them and stuff. But at Carnac, it almost seems legit. The Earth has its own magnetic field — a good thing, since that’s what keeps the solar wind from blowing our atmosphere away like it supposedly did on Mars — and that field is caused by our spinning metallic core. Metal.” He walked forward and slapped his hand against the closest stone. “Like the metals that make up these stone megaliths.”
Cameron looked back at Piper. “Anything containing a ferromagnetic metal — iron, nickel, cobalt, even lodestone —can be magnetized to some degree. There’s a discernible magnetic field at Carnac. You can measure it. It’s as if something long ago polarized then froze them that way. It’s subtle but there. And that’s probably what tourists claim they can feel. But my dad’s lab in Moab? One of their theories is that aliens have — and have always had — plans for our planet that span the globe. Meaning they see Earth as one giant entity. If you wanted do that, you’d need a way to mark certain spots — the same way surgeons draw lines on patients with marker before making the first cuts. One of the way aliens might mark those spots — as well as gathering all sorts of unseen information, right down to — maybe — thoughts and bioenergy … well, let’s just say that electromagnetism is a much, much stronger force than we usually give it credit for, and a hell of a lot stronger than gravity.”
“But you said there’s natural magnets all over the place.”
“Look at your zipper.”
Piper was wearing a pullover with a zipper down the center. The zipper tab wasn’t lying down like it was supposed to. It was standing straight up, pointing at the line of rocks.
Cameron reached to his side, pulled out his knife concealed in a leg sheath, and touched it to the stone’s surface. He let go. The knife, which had a heavy wooden-inlay handle, hung where he’d placed it. Then he tugged with substantial effort and restowed the blade.
“They’re as strong as industrial magnets,” he said. “The kind that will erase your credit cards if you hold them too close.”
“We’re not credit cards. They won’t do anything to us.”
Cameron’s eyes followed the line of stones to the right and left, their demarcation possibly heading off into infinity. They had to go west, and there might not be any practical way to get around in the time they had.
“I hope you’re right,” he said, “because it looks like we’re about to find out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Heather stood in a field surrounded by a wide ring of trees, her feet bare on wet grass. She hadn’t been here a moment ago and realized without surprise that she was dreaming.
But this wasn’t like her normal dreams. Normally, Heather’s dreams were hazy and indistinct, with obvious plots and storylines but no true clarity. She never stopped in dreams to decide whether or not they made sense (they didn’t), and she never experienced any senses other than sight and sound. But the sensation of the grass between her bare toes was distinct. She thought, I’ve missed this. She’d lived in Los Angeles for most of her life, more concrete than grass. She’d never been much of a barefoot girl. But three months in an underground bunker could change a person, make them long for things they’d never cared about before.
In front of her, barely meriting notice in the bizarre “of course” way of dreams, was a double line of enormous gray stones.
“They crossed a line today,” Meyer said.
Heather took Meyer’s hand as he stood beside her. He clasped it for a second then let it drop. It wasn’t a rebuke or rude, but his meaning was clear. He wasn’t here for affection. Probably because the “they” he was referring to, visible just ahead, included Piper. His current wife, whereas Heather — always special to him, a great friend and fellow psychedelic voyager — was his wife in the past.
Heather watched Piper and Cameron step between the stones. They had horses for some reason, and they’d both taken off overshirts and wrapped them over the horses’ eyes to blind them. They were leading their mounts along between the stones as well, but not without difficulty.
Heather turned to look at Meyer. He was the same man as always, but that in itself was strange. He’d left presumably in his pajamas, but he was beside her in one of his finer suits. Looking down, she saw that his feet were also bare.
“Am I dreaming?”
“Would you like a mirror, so you can make fun of yourself for asking?”
“I have to ask.”
“Why? Because this makes sense otherwise?”
Well, yes, she thought. It was perfectly realistic so long as Heather ignored the fact that nothing within it was possible. She distinctly remembered going to bed exhausted, realizing that for once she wasn’t going to get her way. She knew the door had been super-locked somehow (a necessary alteration to the mechanism since the main lock had been destroyed when their new visitors drilled their way in) and that she couldn’t leave without Terrence’s help. She also didn’t know where she was. It wasn’t the house. If this vision was true (and that itself didn’t make sense), Piper and Cameron had to be halfway to Utah by now, but here she was with them. Apparently invisible.
“It’s not like when I normally dream of you.”
Meyer laughed. “I think we both know those weren’t dreams.”
“I meant before now. Even before you were … ” Heather didn’t want to offend him, even in a dream or whatever this was. But she didn’t know another way to say it. “ … taken.”
“‘Taken’ is different from ‘went,’” he said, watching the spot where Piper and Cameron had vanished. He sighed. “Now they can see them.”
“Who?”
Meyer turned to face Heather, handsome as always. It had been a long time since she’d been with him. A long, stressful time with no release save her occasional interlude with the shower massager.
“Even back then, they weren’t dreams. We traveled.”
> Heather laughed. Meyer always said such stupid shit. They’d lay on the floor after drinking Juha’s medicine and purging, and she always saw the worst things for a while thereafter — her soul purging its evil along with her body, according to Juha. But afterward it was a trip. Kinda groovy but nothing otherworldly. Meyer, for all his normal, businesslike stoicism, claimed his experience was different. Metaphysical in a way readers of his Forbes magazine profiles would mock. Meyer always said he went other places. Heather played along, mocking him only lightly, because she’d never really stopped loving him, even after she’d learned to hate the parts of him that lived on the abrasive surface.
“You never believed it. But you didn’t need to, for it to do its job.”
Heather didn’t feel like having this conversation. It wasn’t fun without the drugs.
“Is this real?” Then, remembering she’d recently asked if this was a dream, Heather clarified: “Did this really happen? Am I tripping on a journey right now?”
“How could you travel without the medicine?”
“I’m seeing you, aren’t I?” Heather narrowed her eyes. Everything was so detailed. She was having to work hard to remind herself that she was dreaming, strange as everything felt. She’d felt connected to Meyer since he’d left, and she’d seen him in the same trippy ayahuasca she remembered. But this was different. When Heather woke up, she’d probably feel the same sense of fractured reality.
“You’ve seen me plenty of times before.” Meyer’s voice was almost mocking. She was being tested, led, encouraged to say what he wanted to hear.
Meyer surprised her.
“Talk to Lila,” he said, now taking her hands. “Talk to our daughter.”
“Talk to Lila?”
“She’s in trouble.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“She told me today. Some sort of pains. If I can get her out and take her to a doctor, maybe — ”
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