Chapter 14

After dumping a fourth bag of crap in the burn barrel, Grady trudged back to the house to stuff his face with something easy and quick. He washed up to his elbows before he attempted to wash his face. The top of his head felt like it was caked with debris, but with no real sense of making headway through the mess, he decided to pause. He toasted the half-stale, but no mold, rye bread in the toaster while he sliced long dill pickles in thin strips. He took the last of the deli maple turkey and the pressed chicken, slapping all of it on the rye bread. Last, he mixed two tablespoons of mayo and a tablespoon of Tabasco sauce in a cup before slathering the mixture on the top slice of bread.

He took one bite with a self-promise that he would chew it slowly and wash it down by slowly sipping water before finishing the sandwich. He did chew – before he inhaled the rest of the sandwich in a few bites. Then he slammed down two glasses of water before gracing the kitchen with a mighty belch of the conquering hero. Half a dozen Oreo’s later, he strolled out the door and back to the business.

Back down in the hole, he dug a wooden box out of the next bag. The lid was tongue in groove and slid to the side. Inside, wrapped in a beautiful soft cloth were six small sculptures of animals. They were animals: they had eyes, ears and limbs, but they were alien. The details were precise, showing scales or feathers or whatever the texture was. The material was bright like ivory but heavy like a metal. Regardless of the world from where it came, they would have been precious in any setting. He set the box aside.

Reaching back into the bag, Grady pulled out a small sack made of a rough spun thick thread. The top of the sack was tied with a double-twisted blue string with tassels at either end. Inside were six cylinders of metal about four to five centimeters long and three centimeters wide. Not recognizing the metal, he set the sack aside as well.

His cellphone pinged. Glancing at the time before viewing the message, Grady decided he had reached his limit for the evening. Randy had a stupid question, and Grady was happy to oblige. This time, he washed in the barn sink before locking up and dragging his sorry butt to the house. He texted back and forth while his quesadillas cooked on the griddle.

June 14, 1944

The alarm went off after breakfast. A beautiful day already ruined, I rode quickly to the gate. The being at the gate was a fluttery sort of creature with rills like lace that ran across all their limbs and down from the back of the head to a tail-like appendage at the bottom. The nose was diagonal slits in the center of the face, the mouth underneath had a protruding upper lip. Strapped across the chest of the creature was a rucksack. After touching my crystal and introducing herself, she reached into her sack and withdrew a sewn leather pouch. Opening the top of the pouch, she proclaimed that the four vials contained each of the four compounds for the elixir of millennium life. When I asked for an explanation, she meant thousands of years without aging. She told me a hair-raising tale of assassinations, family murders, and wars that had devastated her land as people fought for the elixir. As she told her story, her skin began to whiten. She pushed the pouch into my hand before she collapsed. I watched her die. I removed the rucksack from the corpse before I rolled the body back through the gate. Under a powerful examination light, the liquid in each vial looks quite odd, almost sinister. It is a tale for the ages and a grand moral too. I dumped the liquids in the burn barrel, keeping the vials, pouch, and a moisture protected book also from the rucksack. Meanwhile, the newspaper hints of “concentration camps” in Nazi lands.

Grady stepped out onto the back porch, unable to calm his restless thoughts. The journal entry had disturbed him like Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun” and Weisel’s “Night” had troubled him for days after reading each of them. He did not need the nightmares. Toying with the wooden case tucked inside pocket of his jacket, Grady took out the alien glasses and propped them on his nose. He caught sight of a fox, or more so its tail, slipping behind the further shed. The image calmed him.