As the radio scan continued to cycle through dead air, Max looked out into the night around him. The range of his headlights hinted at an endless stretch of dried-out nothingness, colonized by scrub grass, creosote bush, cacti, and probably a fair share of bleached bones of varying size and species. Forty days and forty nights in all direction. This wasn’t land that had recently gone dry. It looked like it was born dry, shot malformed from the ocean to land under a misanthropic sky that refused to grant it any relief, any taste of that wet place where it was formed.
This backcountry was broken by the occasional squatty house, built low and set far back from the highway, as if the structure itself was trying to run from civilization and—reaching the end of its tether—collapsed glumly onto the dusty ground in defeat. Max could never figure out why anyone or anything with any sort of viable option would choose to live in such a God forsaken environment. No appreciable water, daytime heat that could kill a man, and a bloodthirsty landscape populated entirely by flora and fauna that was either poisonous or covered in deleterious thorns, or both ; a brutal ecosystem crafted with an eye on repelling or murdering any non-native species that was stupid enough to wander into the neighborhood. And yet, softheads came out in droves to parched places such as this to restart their ridiculous lives, pumped in borrowed water, set up artificial air conditioning, and hunkered down inside their suburban pillboxes, waiting out each day as if they lost a bet.
The radio found a tether and stopped on a fuzzy station espousing the tourist attractions of the area. “—orthern Nevada, some of the most accessible examples of these mysterious petroglyphs can be found at Grimes Point, about twelve miles east of Fallon on Highway—” And just like that, the signal was gone again. Scan . . .
Max was pondering the important issue of how petrogylphs differed from hieroglyphs when the radio halted its roll at the very far end of the electronic dial. After a brief silence, the weak signal transmitted indistinct sounds, like whispers, intermingled with an odd chanting that faded in and out like a spectral dirge. Intrigued by this strange combination, and hoping for a broadcast of a lonely Indian powwow, Max turned up the volume, but the higher it went, the softer the voice and chant became, going silent. There was no apparent signal, but the radio scan was still stopped, locked in on something.
Perplexed, Max noticed that the compass on his dash began to shimmy in its housing, spinning this way and that, even though the road ahead was straight as an arrow.
The silence was shot through by a booming intonation that blasted from the speakers, startling Max, who grasped at the volume button, barely noticing the brownish, misshapen hulk that lurched onto the highway ahead at the far edge of his headlights, gripping something large in its massive paws. Max mashed the brakes while cranking the wheel away from the creature, which dragged a half-eaten carcass of a deer—or was it a dog ?—up the rocky embankment, as the Dodge swerved by, skidding onto the shoulder and burying the front grill into the opposite hillside as the radio went silent again.
The car engine gurgled and pitched under the slightly crumpled hood, then jerked to a stop with a wheeze. Breathing hard, Max fixed his eyes on the compass. It was spinning like a top inside the plastic housing. Was this from the crash ? But the car wasn’t moving, and probably wouldn’t be anytime soon. The radio was again cycling through dead air. And what was that huge fucking thing that ran across the road ? Pebbles rolled down the hillside and onto the car like a hundred tapping fingers.
Max sat frozen, blinking his eyes that were obviously playing tricks on him after too many hours on the road. That thing . . . Was it a desert inbred ? Some sort of mutated bear that wandered too close to a nuclear test site ? This was Nevada, after all, the bullpen of the atom bomb. Max was unnerved, more by what he did know of what he saw than what he didn’t. Or maybe it was what he heard. They both happened so fast, so close together. He was sweating, and felt as if the car was closing around him like a tin can prison. He locked the doors, not sure if what was out there was worse than what he heard inside, as he quickly realized what most terrified him was that the radio would again find that baritone chanting that seemed to echo from somewhere impossible deep. He reached out hesitantly to push the off button, when the scan again stopped on the far end of the dial, but this time, he heard . . . weeping. The strange, uncomfortable sound of a man crying, as if profoundly grieved by the tragically occurred or the unfortunately inevitable. This stayed Max’s hand, before the sobbing splintered into sudden, spastic laughter. What was this nonsense ? What sort of psychotic local pirate station owner or ham radio operator was pranking over the air, scaring the shit out of those who scanned the far end of the dial ? This fucker owed Max a new, shitty, late model Dodge. Or at least a ride to the coast.
The laughter then stopped, and in the silence, the mic picked up sounds of papers being shuffled, tapes stacked methodically. Then, a flat voice that sounded distant in tone and emotion began. “You can hear everything in the desert.” The voice wavered, as if the speaker needed to stop, to breathe, to collect himself. “The buzzing of insects, the hooting of owls, the mad yap of the coyotes . . .
“You got that right,” Max chimed in with irritation to no one but the unhearing voice at the other end of the radio transmission, which came to life again :
“Sometimes those sounds fall away by some unspoken agreement, and in that profound silence, the right type of ears can hear, can sense, the softer, more terrible noises that lurk underneath the normal nighttime din . . . ” Another pause, another intake of breath. “The desert whispers to me, telling me things I never knew existed, never dared dream, giving up secrets older than the primordial soup . . . I record these secrets, as I have been tasked, and broadcast them when I can. But the recording is the key, and I have been diligent, as were those who came before me.”
Outside the car, dry lightning carved the sky, highlighting clouds that looked like seething shapes forming on the horizon. “If you could rewrite the Bible, the Nag Hammadi, the Tablets of Thoth, directly from the source, would you sacrifice your life to do it ?”
Another religious loony tune—this one with a shiny heretical paint job, Max thought, trying to chuckle in spite of a gnawing fear that was coiling in his stomach. He quickly turned the key and tried to give life to a halting ignition while avoiding glancing out into the darkness. He was still shaken by the crash, and nervous that he might be stranded out on this forgotten ribbon of highway with this obviously insane misanthrope and whatever loped up into the hills.
After much protesting and cajoling from Max, the battered engine sputtered to life. He revved out the kinks, then backed out from the embankment and out onto the highway, jammed the car into drive, and drove wobbly on in the same direction he was going, the voice continuing its diatribe, with Max trying not to listen. The compass still spun like a mindless dervish, so it was no good to him. But Max knew where he was going. West. Ever west and as west as he could. He had to leave this weird fucking place behind.
As he built up speed, the radio signal got stronger, and Max found himself listening more intently in spite of himself, finding courage in motion, and increasingly fascinated by this obviously deranged individual who somehow attained access to the radio airwaves. It was like an auditory train wreck, the ultimate metaphysical reality show, and Max couldn’t turn his ears away, or move himself to turn off the radio.
“It’s late in my mission,” the voice said, “and nearly time for me to move on. I’m waiting for my replacement so the work and the message can continue. They tell me that the time of the awakening is at hand, and as such, the preparations have become more urgent than ever before.”
The signal started to fade, and so Max slowed. He was now fully engrossed in this mournful monologue, and felt somehow compelled to keep listening, as if guided by a gentle outside force. Nearly losing the signal all together, Max stopped the car in the middle of the empty highway, dropped into reverse, and trundled backwards in the dark
ness cut open by his white reverse lamps, until the signal increased in strength again. He stopped and idled, leaning forward, as if to better connect with this lone speaker in the darkness.
“The desert tells me to do this, and I do as I’m told, because you never, ever argue with the desert.” The voice giggled again, this time with more mirth, but it ended with a terrified edge, as before. “So, now I whisper to you, speaking for the desert, speaking for those behind the desert, and speaking for myself, as my time here has lately become short.”
The car engine shuddered, seized, and expired. Max didn’t notice.
“There is beauty and horror here, wisdom and madness, and I have drunk deeply of it all. Will you do the same ?” The man went silent. Lightning licked the sky. Max, again feeling the car close in around him, began to wonder if this was merely a one-way conversation.
“Will you ?” the voice asked again.
“Me ?” Max answered.
“You,” the voice continued, as if in confirmation. “Will you do the same ?” The signal wavered and buzzed, then faded into fuzz again.
Max flung open his door and tumbled out of the car. Rushing to the smashed hood, he pushed against the cracked grill with all of his might, and moved the Dodge backward, gaining momentum as he labored. As it picked up speed, Max ran to the open car door and jumped inside, breathing hard as he turned up the volume. The signal came back in, and Max quickly veered the car off the road onto the graveled shoulder, settled in behind the wheel and listened.
“—slicing open the forbidden fruit forever, peeling back the skin to reveal that essential pulp, as knowledge is not evil, it is the natural progression of humanity, and a realization of what we were placed here to do by the creators. I and others in the service of the truth are just signposts, simple steps forward in the awakened dream. The work is the most important thing that humanity is undertaking right now on this planet, battling the old war against those who call madness all things they dare not understand . . .”
The radio strength dipped, and Max was about to hop out and reposition his car yet again, when it resumed.
“My time with the work is almost complete, as my vessel has been filled to the cracking point . . . I now wait for another . . . One who has been promised, who will come to pick up the transcription while I move on . . .” More fuzzy static. “The work isn’t about good or evil, as good and evil do not exist. Those are arbitrary judgment calls, muddied by rationalizations. Only order and chaos are real. Only light and dark. Only knowledge and ignorance. Out of these primal forces spring everything we know. And I now know just a mere fraction of what is out there, and sometimes wish I didn’t, as in its transcendent power, it has ended me for this sphere . . . My brain has heard too many whispers, dreamed too many times beyond the First Gate, has seen too much revealed . . . and now aches for an eternal rest, to exhale after a decade-long upload. I seek the silence of the teeming abyss—to rest, and to dream, as has been promised. The veil has been lifted and the bliss of ignorance has been shattered forever, and so now I sit in a state of unsettled wisdom, blinking my watery eyes as if I have looked too long at the sun . . . the unimagined beauty . . . the indescribable horror . . . the unimagined beauty of the indescribable horror . . .” The voice trailed off in rasping awe, then the man took a deep, shaky breath. “Who out there will take my place ? Who dares peek behind the veil, to see the truth in all its many splendors and impossibly endless vistas ? Who will listen to the whispers after I am gone ?”
Max sat in his car, mesmerized by this voice, hanging on every quaver and sigh. This man was obviously bat shit crazy, but in his insanity, there was a powerful certainty about knowledge and realities that Max could scarcely imagine.
“The work must go on, as the truth must be told.” The voice found strength once more. “We weren’t created to live as ignorant insects our entire existence, puttering around our self-made terrarium with our heads dragging blindly in the dust. The lost knowledge handed down from beyond must be brought back, made whole, and again disseminated across our land, if we are ever to rise to the dancing dimensional heights we once knew as a young Arcadian civilization, flush with the magic of sacred geometry and outer technology. These sciences made us gods in flesh. As above, so below. No difference aside from degrees . . . But the weakness, the jealousies, the things they did not foresee . . . Our godhood was torn from us, ripped from walls and hidden in the mud not by natural disaster, but by rank superstition of the stolen elect, beholden only to the bureaucratic fear of an enlightened human race and the freedom of that learning. Pearls before swine, kings to beggars . . . Echoes, echoes, and remnants remain, twisted into cautionary tales uttered by perverts, telling us now to fear the very same fruit that first gave us life, that is the only food we are meant to eat. These echoes remain, and in the hearing, we are lesser for it . . . ”
The voice trailed off with a zigzagging reverberation, as if impacted by an outside interference, before returning again. “For I speak of gods and monsters, creation and eternal life and the destruction of both, the birth of stars and those things living inside them . . . I speak of the Truth of Truths, of the way and wherefores of all realities discovered by those cosmic entities that whisper secrets to those who refuse to live their lives deaf, dumb, and blind as worms. I speak of transcendence, liberation, and terrible paradise . . . And now, I await my replacement so the work and the message can continue. The book was stolen from us, the knowledge ripped from our minds, so it is up to us to rebuild the book, and relearn the knowledge . . . They tell me that the time of the awakening is at hand, and as such, the preparations have become more urgent than ever before—”
—Fssssshpop ! And with that, the battery, the last life force of Max’s shitty late model Dodge, blinked and died.
Max sat behind the wheel in total and utter silence, scarcely able to breathe, scarcely able to believe what he had just heard as his eyes rimmed with tears. It was as if a water balloon popped inside his brain, drenching his insides and leaving behind nothing but a newly scrubbed view of his destiny. His meaning. He felt reborn, dancing atop a hunger he never knew existed. No longer was he worried about reaching the coast. All he knew now was that he had to keep listening to this transmission, at whatever cost.
The increased strength of the signal just before the death of his ride meant that the tower—and most likely the source of the voice—was near. Max scrambled out of his car, intent on finding this strange person and learning more. This broken, impossibly enlightened man knew something, believed in something with every fiber of his tortured being, and Max had to figure out why.
Max was out of the car and running up the center of the highway, and soon discovered a weed-choked access road that led off from the main drag and up into the noxious wilds of the Nevada desert. Max’s gaze followed what he surmised was the direction of the path up into the hill country, where he noticed a small red light floating in the higher elevations, like a disembodied eye keeping watch over the dead sand below.
Max looked back at his car, threw his keys into the darkness, and set out for the guiding red light that lurked somewhere out there, waiting for him.
Bony fingers of lightning crackled above, strobe-lighting the ominously shaped clouds. Max walked quickly, his path between lightning flashes barely illuminated by a waxing moon, hanging low and sallow over the ring of mountains gnawing the sky like the craggy molars of a monstrous exposed jawbone. His shoes crunched over shattered plates of volcanic stone, pushing out the noises of the desert that the quivering, hollow voice described. The hovering red light was getting closer, and so Max moved onward, continuing his tumbleweed journey by rootless foot. Once again, he found courage in forward motion, scant as it was. The meaning, the meaning . . .
After nearly an hour, Max spied a stand of stunted trees that seemed to coalesce out of the darkness on a ridge slightly above. As he neared, he could just make out a dilapidated shack squatting amid the gnarled timber, blaste
d ghostly white by decades, maybe centuries, of enduring the spite of the brutal Nevada sun, which seemed extra angry with this part of the world as if by result of an old and festering grudge. Every hundred yards or so, a rough hewn stone monolith of greenish gray stone—which didn’t seem to originate from the surrounding hills, or anywhere on the continent, really—stood sentry, forming a wide, easy-to-miss circle around the circumference of the ridge.
Passing through the loose knit ring of stone, Max quickened his pace and approached the old shanty, which was built up atop an ancient foundation of crumbling adobe, like those found in the ruins of the cliff-face domiciles constructed by the mysteriously vanished Anasazi that Max had explored several years back while tumbling through New Mexico. Anchored by the clay foundation, random building materials were haphazardly pasted and lashed, to keep out the wind and sun and sporadic bouts of furious downpours that sought to wash away those godless things that made their home in the desert.
Max walked to the front door, leaned in close and listened. The faint, hollow voice that was now so familiar could be heard inside. Emboldened, Max tried the door, and found it unlocked. He opened it and pushed inward. The door creaked on protesting hinges and sat open, yellowish light spilling out into the night, momentarily blinding Max. The voice was louder. Nothing moved inside. Steeling his resolve, Max entered.
The small outer room was lit by several naked light bulbs that hung from the ceiling, buzzing with flies and beetles. The raw light cast harsh shadows on stacks of moldering newsprint, boxes of moth-eaten clothes, and various detritus that one would normally associate with a bunker existence. Canned food. Jugs of yellow liquid. A gas mask hanging from the barrel of a large bore sniping rifle. The voice was coming from a back room, sectioned off by a ratty curtain. Max walked through the maze of refuse and pushed back the drape, terrified and thrilled in equal measure to meet the intermediary of this message that had brought him from the known road into the weird wilderness.
Lost Signals Page 4
