Lost Signals (6 page)

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 darkness 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, blasted 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.

Max found no one waiting beyond the curtain. Instead, he discovered a cramped yet deserted room hemmed in by high racks of notebooks and journals, facing a corner heaped with a precariously arranged amalgam of new and incredibly old radio equipment surrounding a makeshift broadcast booth. Analog modulators, reel-to-reel players, a turntable, magnetic cassette docks, CD ports, and a laptop, all wired together in the same haphazard fashion as the shack itself. A DIY broadcast station carved out of overstuffed shelving and countless stacks of yellowing paper.

The old iron office chair behind the microphone was empty. A digital recording was playing, continuing a pre-taped monologue transmitted out into the desert night, into Max’s car, into countless other cars, and homes, and minds.

“And so,” the recorded voice continued. “The work must go on, even here, at this broadcast station at Grimes Point, built here because here has always been, and shall ever remain, a doorway to what the Early Ones called Star Nation before moving on, what we call The Outer Places, and the Realm of the Elders, where all is nothing and nothing is all in this dance of divine illusion . . .”

As the voice continued, Max explored the room, picking through the reams of notebooks and folders, blowing off thick red dust that had settled everywhere, and reading a few lines of wildly advanced and esoteric learning—mind-bending formulae, non-Euclidean calculus, quantum physics, interlaced with blurbs of history and a shocking understanding of the universe and inter-dimensional travel. Max moved to the broadcast table where lay an open journal. Paging through it, he discovered bizarrely grouped information assembled into monologues, written out in a sort of movie script format, similar to the ones heard on the radio, similar to the one the voice was relaying at that very moment, which Max followed along with his finger
 
:

“Upon receiving my assignment and arriving here, I spent some time alone among the rocks, discovering the promised doorway that I shall soon revisit for the final time . . .”

Max rifled through the notebooks and tapes around him, noticing dates that went back several hundred years. This was not just a broadcast booth, Max realized, but a library, a repository of arcane and antiquated knowledge off the scale of human imagination.

Stunned by the implications of what loomed around him, Max then noticed a line of several dozen framed photographs on the wall, of different people manning the microphone, sitting in that heavy chair, moving back through the ages, from color pictures to black and white to muddy sepia tone. Two dozen men and women of varying ages, races, and obvious social standing, all sitting in the same pose in front of the same microphone with the same grim expression and slightly unbalanced gleam in their eyes.

The most recent speaker continued his taped oration, as Max moved in closer and squinted at the last photo to the right, which showed a man not much older than him, staring haughtily into the camera of an unknown photographer, the instruments of transmission glowing behind him. “I felt as though I had passed into a pinhole poked through realty, taking me outside linear time and into the seething void . . . Grimes Point is a wrinkle in the fabric of this brittle plane, a carefully plotted and placed dimensional distortion allowing access to and from the Place of the Beginning, and the measureless vistas of the Continuing Chaos—a place forgotten or shunned throughout the course of human history. But a place that was also sought out, by those brave seekers who heeded not the fear . . . This is just one outpost, numbered six, and is one of many, where others like me continue the work to rebuild that which was stolen from us, a primal birthright ripped from our molecular memory. They took from us our knowledge, our book, but we will rebuild it, and again teach the truth through the written word, through the electronic ether, through the television and the radio waves . . . We seek to swing the wrong back to the right, through darkness and light, and ready the awaiting flock . . .”