“So what?” the woman in the sweater answered quickly.
“So what? We only have something that appears to be a completely impossible object placed in an impossible location, causing an accident, and we haven’t the faintest clue yet—no one has—as to what it is or who placed it there…or why. Now no one’s going to pull something like this off without some kind of a major agenda. I’d just like to know what that is and why the perpetrator is still in hiding.”
“I think….” A man of about thirty, sitting on a folding plastic chair and wearing a light green T-shirt with the logo “Life is Good,” cargo shorts, and hiking boots, spoke up next. “That we might not even be asking the right question if we’re asking who put that big globe there. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“We need to ask what put the globe there. I don’t think it’s manmade at all,” the woman in the colorful sweater said.
Rick thought he saw Cornelia wincing next to him. When they made eye-contact, he saw her mouth the words, “They’re jumping to completely wild conclusions.”
“No way it’s manmade,” someone else said from the crowd.
“OK!” the man in the loud purple denim shirt said. “That worries me even more.”
“But why the worrying?” the woman in the bright sweater challenged him with a pleading tone. “I mean, that’s my whole point here; why the negativity? I’m just bothered by all the distrust. Maybe this is a completely positive, transformative phenomenon. Maybe we need to get ready to embrace it.”
There were a lot of nods in the crowd. But, Rick realized upon a closer inspection of the group, there were just as many looks of quiet, edgy concern.
“Lois, I’m not quarrelling with you in theory,” a slightly paunchy man with a perfect jet-black beard—somewhat reminding Rick of the late infomercial pitchman Billy Mays—said from one of the beanbag chairs. “But the thing is that I’d like to know what I’m embracing first….”
“Well, this is interesting,” Dan stepped closer to Rick and said quietly.
“Isn’t it?”
Cornelia leaned toward both of them. “Is this turning into some kind of hawks and doves debate?”
“Probably,” Knight said. “I’m not surprised, though.”
“Where do you think this is gonna go, Doc?” Rick studied Knight’s expression.
Apparently he wasn’t ready to render a verdict yet because he said nothing more, only studied the gathering.
“Of course, it’s all about what is behind that globe,” the woman in the bright sweater, Lois, said. “I want to know that. Everyone wants to know that. But why are we starting out here with the same old assumptions? Why are we so quick to worry about some kind of a threat?”
“Because,” said the man in expensive purple denim, “whatever made that globe has some pretty impressive resources at its disposal.”
“Yeah,” the man with the black beard said. “The last I heard, the cops have absolutely no idea how anyone could have gotten the giant thing onto that road. Know what I’m saying? Totally impossible if you’re using any known earthly technology.”
There were murmurs in the crowd. Rick thought he heard some references to the Egyptian pyramids and South American ruins.
“So why are you saying the unearthly technology is a threat?” Lois asked.
“I’m not saying that,” replied the man with the beard. “It’s only that—”
“That you need to consider the possibility that whoever has that kind of technology could do anything he wanted to you,” Purple Denim exclaimed.
Rick noted how the man’s voice rose ever so slightly.
“And that automatically means that they want to harm you?” said a twenty-something man wearing a Homer Simpson hooded sweatshirt.
Rick saw the look of satisfaction on Lois’s face. At least one of her clear allies was speaking up.
“Well, at least there’s a consensus that we’re dealing with something out of this world,” a man’s voice spoke up quietly from behind Rick and his partners. When they turned to see who it was, they saw a man in jeans, a green plaid shirt, and a light brown blazer nodding at them. He appeared to be somewhere in his mid thirties, of a somewhat average build and nondescript face, but with probing, quick, inquisitive eyes. “Hey,” he said, and nodded at the group. “I’m Joe Lansing—”
“The Mount Shasta Herald?” Lacy asked quickly.
“Yeah, the local press,” Lansing replied with a slow grin and a nod. “So you’re covering all this as well, I see.”
“Just at the right place at the right time,” Rick said.
“For a TV show, right?”
“Hopefully,” Rick said before Cornelia jumped in.
“We didn’t come here to do a story on any mystery stones,” she said. “Just the town and its legends.”
“But are there any legends of mystery stones up here?” Knight asked.
“No…no, there aren’t,” Lansing said in a tone that might have been either concern or amusement. “It looks like you stumbled onto a brand-new mystery.”
“Lucky for both of us, I guess,” Rick said, but snuck a quick glance Cornelia’s way.
“Exactly,” Lansing said with a grin stretching the right side of his face. “So let’s see what the locals are making of the whole thing.”
As the debate veered into such high-strangeness territory as whether or not earth spirits were telepathically communicating through the globes, a loud, not quite shrill but taut, stressed voice nearly yelled over the crowd, “Wait a minute!”
The debate came to a halt.
“I think,” someone said—still very sharply—from the crowd, then paused for a beat. “I think we’re all missing the fucking point here.”
Rick was sure everyone was startled by the obscenity itself, since no one else said a word.
“We’re all missing the big picture, all right?”
The source of the interruption stepped forward. He was, Rick thought, the most startling contradiction of impressions. The man, somewhere roughly in his mid to late forties, held and carried himself with something of a hard, attitudinal swagger that matched his commanding tone. Yet he looked like the vision a lazy hack writer—one content to rely on easy stereotypes to populate a story—would have of a geeky, awkward small town male librarian. Tall, gangly, and narrow-shouldered, with a head of thinning, short, curly brown hair highlighting a narrow head and wedge-like face, the man wore a baggy pair of dark brown corduroy pants, topsider shoes, and a red-and-black-patterned buttoned sweater. As the man walked into the center of the gathering, his gaze flittered about the room in quick birdlike flashes. His narrow, pallid, somewhat cheese-like complexion and face with its probing agitated glances made Rick think of an angry librarian yet again, one prowling the common reading areas and looking to reprimand someone for making too much noise.
“What do you mean, Hank?” someone spoke at last.
“I mean we’re all wasting our time arguing about ridiculous trivialities here!” Hank, the agitated man, replied. His voice was again hard, resolute, and commanding. There was nothing nebishy in his behavior, Rick realized. Whoever this guy was, no matter how rowdy the debate was going to get, he was going to stand his ground and not hesitate knocking some heads.
“Oh, him,” Joe Lansing mumbled as he leaned toward Rick. “Hank Adler. We did a story on him two years ago. He’s a UFO abductee and activist.”
Rick caught the accent on “activist.”
“Oh?”
“Claims the aliens did torturous experiments on him….”
“And the government knows all about it?” Cornelia cut in.
“Of course. He leads petition drives and tries to get a million people to march on Washington to demand answers.”
“I hope he succeeds,” Lacy said with a perfect deadpan. “That would make for a great
episode of Confirmation.”
Rick glanced toward Dan Knight, noting the professor’s intense study of the crowd and Hank Adler’s performance.
“Hank!” Lois suddenly spoke up. “I don’t see how you mean trivialities….”
“Who made the globe?” Hank replied. “Why did they make it? Are they good? Are they evil? Listen to yourselves, people!” His voice seemed to rise in volume and resolve with every word.
With his thunderous vehemence, Rick was actually surprised that Hank hadn’t yet been able to marshal at least the Mount Shasta area for his march on Washington.
“Can’t you realize the most important thing here?” Hank boomed. “What we’re all saying? Look, people, the point here is that we all agree on one important thing!”
This time Hank paused ever so dramatically. Rick noticed some heads starting to nod. Realization appeared to be dawning on the crowd.
“The point,” Hank said, “is that we all agree that we have solid, tangible evidence of an unexplained event. We have the real thing, folks. An unexplainable, paranormal event. And this time….” Hank almost shouted, his right index finger stabbing forward several times, stabbing toward unseen enemies perhaps. “…This time, no one’s gonna explain this away with some bullshit about mass hysteria and hallucinations and cloud formations and stars and hoaxes. Can’t you see the significance of all this?”
Affirmative mutterings rose from the crowd. Nearly everyone was nodding now.
“We are entering a whole new world. Finally! All of us! This entire world is on the edge of something new. Something that’s gonna change all of us. And let’s just see someone tell us that we’re crazy, that we’re delusional and can’t tell a fifty-ton stone ball from swamp gas and car headlights. Let’s hear a scientific explanation for this one….”
“Oh, yeah! Scientific!” a disdainful voice rose from the crowd. “You’re all crazy and you don’t know what you see. Science in the twenty first century. How nice.”
“Exactly!” Hank replied with bile in his voice. “Let them come and tell us that we’re crazy this time. Bring it on! We’re not letting anyone make fools of us any longer—you got that, folks?”
Loud, raucous, angry, affirmative responses rose from the crowd.
Then Hank turned toward Tony Griffin’s camera, stabbing a finger toward it. “You got that?”
“Wow,” Cornelia said quietly. “I think what he meant was that this is payback time.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Rick replied. “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“What I was thinking,” Cornelia said, then paused, apparently looking for the right words, “is that it’s kind of…frightening.”
Rick’s attention was demanded by the vibration of his cell phone. He fished it out of his pocket and glanced at its display. The call, it indicated, was from Jerry Peretti.
He took the call and listened to their producer’s breathless, harried revelation.
Cornelia and Lacy gave him questioning looks.
“What’s going on?” Knight was the first one to speak, though.
“It was Jerry again. They found another one.”
7.
Front Page
“THE MARBLES OF THE GODS?
MYSTERY GLOBE BAFFLES MOUNT SHASTA”
By: Joe Lansing, The Mount Shasta Herald
For a place used to its share of mysteries, speculations about the unknown and the extraordinary, the Mount Shasta area is now left to wonder about the origins of a massive stone globe that appeared seemingly overnight on a stretch of Scenic Lane.
The mystery globe, measuring fifteen feet across, was discovered overnight by Richard Ballantine when he crashed his Nissan Pathfinder into the object. According to Ballantine, a cast member of a new paranormal reality television show, Confirmation: Investigations of the Unexplained, he was unable to avoid a collision with the globe as he came over a rise in the road.
Since numerous people living in the vicinity had used the road during the afternoon and the evening prior to Ballantine’s accident, how the object could have been placed there without anyone else noticing is, as of yet, beyond explanation.
“We examined [the globe] as best we could before the police removed it,” Ballantine said, “but we couldn’t come up with any ideas for how a perfect sphere that big could have been placed out there.”
While speculations of the globe’s supernatural origins have been spreading, Mount Shasta Chief of Police James Carpenter insists that there are bound to be perfectly down-to-earth explanations for the enormous object.
“It is absolutely not outside the capabilities of any number of powerful moving tools and lifting equipment to place a giant object like that on that road,” Carpenter said. “There is no reason at all to think that aliens or any kind of magical or mysterious forces put the globe there.”
The police department insists that the globe must be the work of an unusually creative practical joker.
For many others in the area, however, the mystery globe is all too similar to what they see as unexplained ancient stone constructions around the world. Some compare the globe to Egyptian pyramids, England’s Stonehenge, or the enormous stone statues known as Moai on Easter Island. One witness said that the globe looks like a marble left behind from the toy set of a giant alien child.
What makes the Mount Shasta globe so intriguing to everyone, however, is the fact that no mystery globes like this have ever been found before.
“I definitely think this is a sign of something very positive,” said Lois Mackenzie, a webpage developer who went to see the removal of the globe. “I think some elemental force is trying to communicate with us. I think it’s speaking on behalf of the earth, on behalf of nature, and I think it’s saying that it is peaceful. [It’s significant that] the object is round and that we have never seen anything like this before. It represents the spirit of the planet, I think. It might represent the real dawn of a new age for all of us. The more I think about it, the more I believe that I just somehow, you know, felt that this was going to happen. There was almost a vibration of positivity, I guess, in the air before the globe showed up.”
Whatever the explanation for the globe might be, it is certainly bringing new attention to the Mount Shasta area. According to the police department and the chamber of commerce, reporters from Japan, Germany, Spain, and England have all arrived in town to cover the mysterious phenomenon.
Chapter 2
Dr. Knight Returns to New Jersey. Rutgers
Geology. Logic. Scotland. The Peter Rollins Show.
1.
“It looks pretty tightly developed up there,” Ballantine said. “A lot of houses. A lot of driveways.”
Following his gaze, Knight saw that he was looking at the upper reaches of the valley they stood in.
“Yeah,” Cornelia replied. “Upscale neighborhood. The kind of people I would guess would quickly ask questions and make phone calls if strange machinery came rumbling through here in the middle of the night.”
“Like helicopters?” Ian asked.
“Right on all counts, ladies and gentlemen,” Knight replied. “This forest preserve is surrounded by a seven and eight figure income neighborhood.”
Tony let out a short whistle. “I guess we’re on the right side of the tracks. So is this the part of New Jersey you’re from?”
“No,” Knight replied. He almost left it at that, but felt his teammates’ eyes on him. For whatever reason, they seemed to think he owed them more information about his background. “I’m from north of here,” he said, feeling a spike of irritation surge through him. “Newark.”
“All right, guys,” Cornelia said at length after surveying the terrain, thankfully breaking an uncomfortable silence. “So are we going to get a local explanation again for how the globe was trucked in here?”
“Withou
t a trace on this muddy ground?” Lacy added.
The globe was found by a pair of hikers in the Watchung Reservation, a nearly two-thousand acre forest preserve in the hilly terrain of the central New Jersey township. The elevation of their position was four hundred feet. The reservation was nestled in the middle of one of the wealthiest communities in the state, accessible only through a winding network of narrow, two-lane roads. Like many millionaire neighborhoods, the Watchung residents liked to keep their town hard to navigate, just to dissuade too much through traffic. It was a geographically ideal spot to buy seclusion and privacy in one of the most populous states in the country.
Just trucking such a globe to this height, traversing the roads—presumably at night—would have been hard enough. But once—What would you call them? Knight wondered. Mystery Masons? Globe-Planters?—whoever was behind the bizarre enterprise got to the forest preserve, unloading the object in the narrow valley where they did had to have been much tougher than what they’d accomplished in Mount Shasta. There the globe had been placed on a dirt road. True, it was a descending dirt road, Knight recalled, and the placement of the stone object would have required an impressive bit of surveying work to make sure it was placed in just the right spot to avoid rolling away. But the Mount Shasta globe was still on a road. Here, the globe showed up on a footpath next to a river—well, a stream more like it, Knight considered—and in a spot that could in no way be approached by the kind of massive hauling vehicle required to move such a tremendous object.
“Only by helicopter,” Knight muttered.
“Say that again,” he heard Melinda calling to him.
Knight glanced up at their athletic sound-specialist.
“We’re rolling,” she said.
Both Matt and Tony were covering him with their cameras. It was time for a little performance.
Confirmation Page 4
