Chapter 6

I awoke the following morning with a painfully sore head at the mouth of a cave not far from Carcosa. My rifle and pistol were both still with me and I didn't sense any danger at all as I slowly and carefully walked down towards the town. My assailants were apparently gone and with only a cursory scan of the surrounding hills I somehow knew that for now I was all alone.

The town had once again been burned to the ground, this time with gasoline, including all of the mobile home trailers of the remaining miners. I found the bodies of two of them and carried them to join the other pair that I had left in my crippled Land Cruiser yesterday. These four bodies were dumped into my usual disposal pit.

I thought for a moment I could hear laughter coming from below, deep in the earth, but was probably just my head wound, which was quite well bandaged but aching, albeit now in a tolerable manner. I wondered which of the surviving miners had found and rescued me, as I now owed him a debt of gratitude and I hoped that he had survived the assault safely underground.

The destruction this time seemed fairly permanent, with every single remaining above ground structure torched down to bare earth and rock. The first big windstorm this summer would probably bury the last traces of the old stone foundation under a foot of sand and dust, hiding them forever, baring a major excavation ... which would never happen. In a couple of years the site would be indistinguishable from the high desert that surrounded it. Carcosa would soon be lost again to both the sands and the sands of time. Probably just as well.

The four horses were gone from where they had been temporarily stabled, but I had I feeling that I would find them and their riders down at Hali Lake, so after grabbing my emergency backpack, I started the five mile downhill hike, taking the journey down the mountain trail quite slow and stopping often to drink water. I knew I wasn't in top shape even before my accident and didn't want to get caught surprised again.

At around mid-morning I crept up carefully to their camp next to Hali Lake and I found the two remaining assassins, plus their gravely wounded companion that I had crippled and gut-shot yesterday, along with all of their horses. At least they had the sense not to let their horses drink from the poisoned water. They were deep in heated discussion and not paying any attention to their surroundings. I had little difficulty sneaking up close enough to listen to them talk for a good twenty minutes before I put a quick but dead accurate head shot into each of them with the rifle. For good measure I gave them each another head shot with my pistol just to make sure.

Their wounded fellow was in pretty bad shape and they had been debating trying to call for a helicopter to come pick him up, but this was against their instructions. Being good little zealots, following orders always took precedence over proper common sense. The kid, the youngest of the lot was unconscious and had a bad fever. He wasn't going to survive the drive to Caliente, nor could I revive him enough to get some answers, so regrettably I gave him a double-tap in the head with my pistol.

The fellow I had killed yesterday was already in the back of one of their trucks so I loaded up the other three bodies into it and drove back up to town to dump yet another four fresh bodies, consigning them to the 'hidden ones' and their unholy hunger, I laughed to myself. I didn't stop to listen to hear if I could still hear their laughter coming from deep below. Damn Carcosa and its legends! You take a little bump on the head and then your addled brain starts to believe in wild Indian and miners legends!

Next I cleaned out my beloved Toyota of anything remotely personal and then pushed it off of the side of the road down a steep hill. Then I torched it for good measure. Damn, I loved that Land Cruiser! The Boss had bought it for me ten years ago and it still drove these hills like a mountain goat. Forget the silly old legends; it was these wild-eyed religious zealots that were now going to pay!

The bad guys didn't have much in the way of personal stuff. I eventually found two driver's licenses, both listing New Covenant, Utah as their home. No credit cards, no pictures of their children, nothing at all remotely personal. Both trucks had registration and insurance papers listing the New Celestial Covenant Church, of the same town. Each had their own personal compact Bible/Book of Mormon, very well read. These guys didn't seem to be normal Latter Day Saints (LDS) from Salt Lake City; this looked like some extreme fringe kook group that probably lived out in the wilderness and spent their hours praying and waiting for the immanent return of their God. That made me feel a whole lot better about my odds of fighting these guys and actually winning.

I took all of the limited personal effects with me and hoped that this would be more than enough stuff to start my investigation with later back in Vegas.

I decided that I could drive one of their pickup trucks back to Vegas, but I wasn't happy about abandoning the horses here. The poor beasts would just drink from Hali Lake and die slowly and madly until they became food for the cougars. Besides it wasn't their fault that their owners were stupid and insanely crazy religious zealots. I picked the nominally better truck with the least mileage on it, but they were otherwise virtually identical. I drove the other one down another steep hill well out of sight and finished it off with the last of the gasoline.

It took another hour to clean up all other traces of our presence here including stray footprints and blood splatters. I wanted as little trace of this adventure as was possible. Undoubtedly these zealots had friends and someone at the top was giving the orders. I didn't want to take the slightest chance that they could find me before I was good and ready to find them.

It took the rest of the day to make two trips with the two horse trailers down to Elgin to get the four horses released them just outside of town. There was a bit of decent grazing land there with a small stream nearby and that would tend to their needs fine until some local rancher decided to claim them. All of them were unmarked, without brands or other signs of prior ownership. They didn't like the smell of me at all and went in a panic if I tried to pet them, but they showed no reluctance at all to leave the trailers and run quite a good ways away from me once they were released. Eventually by nightfall the small herd was all reunited under a tree by the stream and glaring lasers at me, not budging an inch until I drove off, after removing the license plates from the two empty horse trailers. Like the animals, some local rancher would soon find a use for these 'abandoned' vehicles.

My head was hurting fairly badly again by the time that I finally arrived home late that night. Dawn was still keeping late hours herself and I didn't see her that night or even the next morning. Oddly, I didn't seem to care.

A trip to the emergency room and x-rays the next morning revealed that I had a slight skull fracture but nothing that needed resetting. They gave me six stitches for the cut to my head and told me to get a lot of rest but assured me that I should be fine. This sounded like good advice so I called my boss the CIO and then my loyal secretary and co-conspirator Tanya to tell them that I'd had a slight accident while on company business and would probably take the rest of the week off. No one except for Tanya had missed me while I was gone anyway.

I slept a lot that week, and I had the strangest dreams the entire time as I relived my experience in the ghoul cave, deep under Carcosa. I'd have dismissed everything about this trip as dementia due to my skull injury, except for three little problems.

First, I was now hearing a voice in my head, a quiet little voice that didn't laugh, or give me insane orders to do things such as shoot the President in order to impress Jody Foster, but I usually didn't like what it was saying, so I tried hard to ignore it. I had suffered a major blow to the head; when I healed it would go away, or so I thought.

Secondly, the smell and taste of cooked meat was somehow now unsettling my stomach. I liked my steaks medium before, but now I could only just tolerate them rare. Even then the flavor and texture just didn't taste right. I chalked this up to my brain taste buds being knocked out of whack along with the rest of my skull.

Then finally, in my pants pocket I found an old folded up piece of aged yellowed paper, with the printed label "Monolithic Pictures" and the hand-written notation, "Unaussprechliche Kulte — (1926) 2 reels".

This was one of the legendarily rare early silent horror films, alleged filmed in Bulgaria in the early 1920's before being sold to a US distributor later in the decade. This film appears in many old horror movie guides as being one of the most horrific and realistic silent horror films of the period. No prints or even any still shots of the film were known to still exist, and many collectors rate this film among the top ten "lost films' of all time.

This is not too surprising really. At best guess, about 75% of all of the silent films ever made are now considered 'lost'. The film stock was fragile, highly flammable, and the silver content of the film coating could be recycled relatively easily. Most studios couldn't be bothered to save any of their past pictures, as they needed the storage space for their current marketable releases. Accordingly, once a theater chain was done showing a film, the print often was immediately burned, tossed into the garbage or sent to be recycled.

A print of this lost masterpiece was worth a fortune!

Obviously my miner friend, knowing my interest in old movies had given me this old packing slip while I was unconscious from my fall as some sort of reminder that we could apparently indeed do business now, and that this film, and maybe many others, were now available for trade.

I still didn't then quite understand what he would want in return. I somehow knew that money wasn't the answer. Later, when I did finally understand ... I had already taken my first steps well down the path for becoming forever damned with no sight of any possible redemption anywhere near the horizon! By then, the cost seemed only reasonable and somehow appropriate.

The worst part about being home with my brain completely scrambled was that suddenly every moment spent with my family had now became an ordeal that could scarcely be tolerated. My new inner voice was calmly telling me what liars and cheats they all were and how the entire house utterly reeked with the foul odor of deceit everywhere. I took more painkiller drugs and waited for my new schizophrenic advisor to helpfully suggest the applied use of long sharp kitchen knifes to correct my domestic difficulties, but thankfully it never did.

It would be probably helpful to reiterate here that for at least the last ten or fifteen years, my wife and I had become increasingly estranged. We kept different hours, each working erratic work schedules and even slept in separate bedrooms ... most of the time. Our sex life was irregular, but probably averaged only about once or twice a month. Dawn used to have a very high sex drive but it had declined significantly over the years and became, in the end, just another one of her means of controlling me. If I initiated sex, invariably I would be refused. She always initiated lovemaking ... except that this was now just fucking now, pure sex rather than any actual love. Bad sex is still better than no sex at all, but not by much.

The children all looked to their mothers for guidance, the eldest that were nearly grown especially so. I had been permitted very little input into their raising and every attempt I had ever made to subject even minor discipline onto them resulted in loud violent family fights, as invariably their mothers would storm in to their rescue.

While home recuperating, I began to discover just how appallingly low my stock had fallen in the household. Even the youngest children, treated me at the dinner table with open derision and scorn, and my own eldest both had an obvious smirking contempt for me that they didn't even try to hide or disguise their utter hatred of me.

My inner voice started to tell me something important but I ignored it and popped another pain pill and escaped back to bed.

What the hell had I done wrong? And more importantly, why hadn't I noticed this years ago and done something about it then? My secret advisor kept whispering advice to me and I had to admit that most of it made good sense. I decided to get my thoughts all collected and organized this week and Saturday I'd corner Dawn and get a few things established. Probably starting World War Three in the process, but I was actually looking forward to it!

Saturday night, as planned, I ambushed Dawn in the kitchen, where she was having after dinner coffee with her sister Diana, and we got into it hot and heavy right from the start. Dawn was so surprised at my going right into the attack that she was caught flatfooted and on the defensive for most of our discussion. Even Diana was looking at me with astonished wonder!

"She's utterly astonished that the wimp has found his backbone." My little voice said, and I didn't disagree.

I laid down the new law of the land. Expenses were going to be cut — significantly, and Dawn was now expected to contribute some of her salary to maintain the household. I'd still pay the mortgage, but every other household expense was now hers, gas, water, electricity, groceries, her credit cards and especially her car payment for her new Mercedes. I was still earning a hefty salary more than capable of supporting a large extended family but it was disappearing like water down a drain. The days of excess were over ... at least on my dime.