#and there's *gestures at first world settler colonialism* reasons for that

[soup-mother]

it's just like... every single day someone has to explain "it is going to be harder to immigrate to Australia than you seem convinced it is" and every single time it comes as such a fucking shock to these people.

[blackevermore]

x Secrets of The Lake: The Company of Misery and Pain ( Also on A03)

{ Chapter 16 }

Summary: Vladimir Masters’ family tree has always been tainted by secrets swept under the rug. From generation to generation there have been countless reasons the Masters’ family had seemed to keep private from the public. Even to this day, Vladimir was no exception. But what was one to do when a restless spirit from the settlement years finally breaks free from restraints and demands you answer for your ancestor’s crimes? Vladimir doesn’t know. However, Clockworks does.

Notes: We just having fun, rewriting some of the canon, new adventure new characters. I will apologize now for any grammar, spelling, weird sentence structuring in advance. My brain writes faster than my fingers and even when I go back through to reread it I still miss things. Sorry about that!

Word Count: 4.2K

P.s: Chapters will be taking longer to get out which means they will get longer to read as well

P.p.s: IT'S BEEN TWO YEARS SINCE I WROTE A FUCKING CHAPTER???

Vladan was lost in thought as his hands went to work cutting away at the softwood with his pocket knife. He was thinking. His brother was seemingly getting better and that ceased his fear of his sibling’s becoming. Tayonna had played a major part in doing so, making Vladan grateful she was there. However, the more he became interested in Tayonna the more he found himself being unable to stop thinking about her. The other housemaids liked her and took kindly to including her in their chores, his mother held a weird air about having the woman around despite being overly welcoming towards her before, and Vladan’s father was too caught up in his work to have a say in anything that regarded the woman other than asking her for his gloves and where he left his letters. 

None of their opinions mattered though, Luther was the only one that Vladan had the urge to listen to when it came to the woman. Luther had nothing but good things to say, he praised her ability to help him and her company more than anything. She would tell him stories from her homeland and how much she missed being able to go about her day doing whatever she wanted. Luther at times felt bad that Tayonna was there with them. He admitted to Vladan that he even thought of sending Tayonna back to the islands and giving her dual citizenship so she would be free under Western law.

“How do you think you can do that?” Vladan asked. He was a scholar of business and science, he had simple knowledge of European affairs when it came to the business of slaves. But the colonies were something different. England had more power here than Prussia or any of the Germanic states.

“Well, I can’t marry her. I’m dying.” Luther let out a bellyful laugh that quickly rolled itself in a fit of coughs. Vladan was quick to his brother’s aid with a cup of water and a rag for him to cough into.

Vladan didn’t need Luther to say out loud that he was aware of his eldest brother’s allurement towards Tayonna. It seemed everyone was more and more aware of it while Vladan thought he had kept to his stoic and blank nature. Despite never raising a brow in wonder or smiling at kind gestures, Vladan's (awkward) actions screamed. When the woman was around he stiffened up and fought himself not to look at her. When someone said her name he was quick to distract himself with something and pretend he was busy. If he did have to interact with her he would move them far away from anyone else as if he had a secret to share. It wasn’t Luther who saw it first but rather his mother, Luther was just more vocal about it. And by vocal he was blabbing about taboo things that Vladan was sure even if he held the purest intent with wanting Tayonna’s hand the world would destroy it. 

When they first arrived at the new land Vladan quickly took note of the behaviours of the other settlers and the dos and don’ts. Do take pride in your culture and what boat you came off of. Don’t show too much interest in political affairs unless you want to be dragged into it. Do take part in the social trade of goods that benefit everyone. Don’t treat your slaves like people. That is why the Mægisters’ family house was farthest from the town and prying eyes. 

He wanted her. He wanted to hold her, listen to her stories, see her powers and magic, and be amazed that someone like her could ever exist. The few times he found himself alone with her when she showed him her powers his heart cried out for more. He was becoming greedy. She was something special and for once Vladan felt like he didn’t have to think about his responsibilities. He didn’t have to worry about his schooling, the family business, or his brother’s health, she took it away without touching him or even acknowledging his budding feelings that grew like wildflowers.

Vladan felt his heart sink with the idea of never having Tayonna in the burning way he wanted her. Vladan hands stopped moving and he looked down at the wooden figure he had mindlessly been cutting at. He was kinda impressed with his subconscious making sure he didn’t nick himself in the process. He placed his knife down behind him and turned the figure in his hands. He had made a rose unbeknownst to his conscious attraction to a certain servant who held his heart on a string. After seeing all the flowers Tayonna could create from thin air, roses had become the symbol of Tayonna's presence and Vladan had made a mission of surrounding himself with her one way or another. His victim today was wood, yesterday was his mother’s flowers at the dining table, and last week was a tree he began picking at while taking a short walk in the forest. 

Just like Tayonna, the wood was rough in a few places, smooth where the blade made simple cuts but sharp on edges that should have been curved. But it was still appealing, still something to be amazed by, the wooden rose was in many ways a form of art that few wouldn’t appreciate but many would. 

Nature had become beautiful to Vladan in the months he had stayed in the new lands with his family. This world was so fresh and hardly seen the industrial boom of farm hands and metal parts. Everyone here was starting over which gave nature time to adapt to its new invaders. Vladan looked up from his work and took in the scene of wildlife before him. In the back of the family home in the distance was a river that he knew connected to a pond somewhere beyond his eyes. He saw a few bunnies hopping by and the call of the birds swooping through the air. At times when the world seemed like it was still he had caught sight of deer that crept by. Despite not being a land he knew by heart. The new world was beauty hidden beyond the waters of Europe and destined for something great, Vladan was sure.

“Vladan!” The call of his name brought Vladan back to reality and he quickly snapped his neck towards the side of the house. Tayonna came running at a speed that made him cautious. Her face said all he needed to know as he dropped the wooden figure and began to close the gap between them. When she ran into his arms he gripped her wrist and tried to calm her down. She was speaking in a language he didn’t recognise which made it hard for him to pick apart the few words that did sound like English or Deutsch.

‘Tayonna, calm down! I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Vladan shook the girl gently and that seemed to work to bring the girl down from her adrenaline. The girl's face fell, tears were spiking in the corners of her eyes and she looked away as a few fell. Vladan clenched his jaw as he could only imagine the news she was about to tell him. Luther was dead. Luther had finally chosen to pass and Vladan oddly enough was okay with hearing that news. But when Tayonna opened her mouth to speak Vladan’s face ran pale and his body turned cold.

“Your father is dead.”

Vlad's eyes shot open and he felt a strong need to cry. His breathing was heavy, his throat felt clamped and his eyes burned every time he blinked. He fought the turn of his lips into a frown as he gasped again and choked down a cry. Vladan’s memories were stronger than before and the emotion that came with it almost made Vlad's heart break. He could only imagine getting a call saying his father was dead. Senior Master was a fine gentleman who ran his businesses and made sure his boy was ready for the world when he sent him off the college. He was a strict father but was fair when it came to his love for his son. Vlad could only imagine what Vladan had with his father, if his sadness was this substantial then their relationship was beyond important. As soon as Vlad was able to overcome the sadness a new emotion set in, one that made him anxious and terrified. He didn’t know why all of a sudden he felt like the world was crashing in on him. He raised his hands to his eye level, opening and closing them feeling the slight trimmer every time he opened them.

His breathing was getting harsher as if he had run miles on end and was finally coming to a stop. He rolled to his side and tried to catch his breath but it only made it worse as now he felt like his muscles contract and ache.

‘What am I going to do?’

What?

‘What will I do with my mother?’

Vlad’s mother was dead.

‘Luther? Is Luther next?’

Vlad shut his eyes but the darkness that normally lay behind his lids turned into an out-of-body scene of him watching Vladan having a breakdown in the middle of a field. Vlad was horrified as he watched the man gripping at his hair and then turned to him. Vlad felt his core begin to burn him and he hissed, grabbing at his chest and falling to one knee. Vladan continued to look beyond him and then down at him with a worried look.

“Tayonna,” Vladan’s voice was broken as he spoke towards Vlad who was still hunched in pain. “Protect her, please.” Vladan reached out and clasped Vlad’s shoulders.

“L-Let go of me!” Vlad barked between groans of discomfort.

“Save her!” Vladan screamed in his face. 

Vlad tried to pull away from him and create distance but the pain in his chest kept him at the mercy of the other man. Vladan grip finally let go when the man shot to his feet and turned towards the distance.

“Tayonna!” He screamed and then vanished in the air.

Vlad peeked through his lashes and saw the world around him beginning to change. The sun was blacked out by something in front of it which made everything dark with a red haunting tint. Vlad managed to get back on his feet and staggered a bit, he looked around and was utterly alone. A chill ran down his back as he felt that he was being watched but by whom he had no idea. He turned around trying to see if the area he was in was from his dreams and when he caught sight of the house he fell to his knees again. The house he had seen constantly in his dreams was up in flames with a mass gathering of angry-looking towns folk with weapons and torches in their hands. Vlad’s emotions began to run again as he felt a broken defeat ghost over him as if he was watching his legacy be burnt to the ground. He felt helpless and destroyed. The flames danced in his eyes as flickers of colours painted over him. With each lap of fire crawling around the edges of the house Vlad felt his heart crack and crumble. He was watching his legacy burn down, his bloodline, his ancestor, his family. 

A woman in red looked back at him as she stood in the crowd of town folk. She smirked, overjoyed with his misery and watching everything he had go up in flames. Vlad felt the eyes on him and slowly raised his head but before he could lock eyes with the stranger his core pulsed again and he shut his eyes as a sharp pain crossed through him and then there was a feeling of peace. His core didn’t hurt anymore, the negative feelings that were drowning him were gone and he felt an overpowering drive of security. He felt a pair of arms grab onto him and pull him into an embrace that buried his head and steadied his heart. Vlad let out a staggered sigh and brought his hands to hold onto the body of whoever was holding him. In this moment he didn’t care who it was, he only cared that they were calming him down and surging out the distress he had experienced moments before. He nuzzled his face and took a deep breath inhaling an aroma of a pleasant earthy smell with hints of something sugary. His hands caressed the body and he felt a ping of fear that if he let go they would too and leave him.

Vlad finally dared to open his eyes and when he did he saw he was back in his bedroom. He hadn’t noticed he was pressed against someone until he felt a hand running through his hair. He looked down at the arm that wrapped around his shoulders and saw pale purple skin.

“He came to me,” Tayonna spoke before Vlad could say anything. “He was screaming and you were gasping for air.” Tayonna sounded tired but Vlad could tell that if he saw her face it would say something else. Was she worried? An uncertain conflict between being upset at the man who caused her trouble or uncomfortable with having to calm down a man she didn’t know. Vlad only hummed but didn’t try to pull away. He could hear the sound of her core thumping against her chest and it sounded almost like a lullaby. Neither of them pulled away and as if they had a silent agreement just stayed in each other arms until the following break of day.

When Vlad woke up from his alarm Tayonna was gone and the spot in which she laid last night was cold. Vlad couldn’t tell who was upset that she was gone, him or Vladan, or if they equally wanted Tayonna to stay for different reasons. Vlad could only admit to himself that when the girl was in his bed he felt the utmost relaxation he ever had. Tayonna made his body heavy with comfort and his mind went blank which he hadn’t had in a rather long time. He rolled his eyes at the idea of actually having the ghost in his bed. Maybe she could stay on one side and that would be enough for him to have a good night's rest without any memories that didn’t belong to him or impending dooms that threatened his sleep schedule more than it already did. He hadn’t shared a bed in years, never felt the need to or the want, he was fine being able to stretch out any which way. The few times he had taken someone to bed they were either gone in the morning before he woke up by their own will or the instructions he had given them the night before. Vlad had only ever thought of waking up to one person since college. She would sleepily greet him and kiss him and many more things his wicked mind indulged in. But Maddie would never be in his bed and Vlad was not going to simply walk up to a restless ghost and ask for a snuggle buddy.

Vlad kicked his feet off the side of his bed and rolled his neck. He ran a hand up his shoulder and tried to rub the knots out but gave up when he realized he couldn’t. Last night was a shit show and he would need to book an appointment with his masseuse. He turned back over to the other side of the bed and reached out a hand to rub the sheet. Despite now hosting another person’s mind within his body he did enjoy the company Tayonna gave him. Rather if it calmed his mind or night, being held by someone else lit something inside him he hadn’t had in years.

The imitated intimate nature was not something Vlad got often even with his rare and few late-night partners. They didn’t hold him or run their fingers through his hair with innocent intentions. At times Vlad only craved the partnership that left kisses on his cheek and small touches on his hand. 

When Vlad felt his mind begin to race again with his own saddening needs he snapped forward and got to his feet to start his day. Enough with the melancholy and more with the businessman he was. 

~~~

It had been his silly idea to invite the ghost to dinner which left a bad taste in Dani’s mouth. After almost a month of having the ghost lingering around, Vlad had finally asked her to join him in the final days of dinner before he packed up everything and went back to Wisconsin. Although the ghost could not eat living food he had set up a plate of ectoplasm arranged in a fancy way for the other to enjoy. Once dinner was in full swing Vlad took note that Tayonna hardly picked at her food. He didn’t say anything and just blocked out the way she looked between him and Dani as best he could.

“Does that mean she’s staying here?” Dani asked. Vlad wanted to scold her about talking about Tayonna as if she wasn’t there with them. Vlad swallowed, placed his fork down and crossed his leg over the other.

“It doesn’t seem that Tayonna can go anywhere without me. Her injuries were caused because she tried to leave. From what I understand she can not go too far without something happening. So, she will be coming with me back home.” Vlad gave his daughter a mannerly smile and Dani was unduly relieved. 

Then Dani became curious, “Wait, how come she can’t leave?”

Vlad didn’t want to tell Dani that Tayonna and he were bound by the core. That would raise too many red flags and likely send the girl off in a fit. Dani was still on edge about Tayonna being around, finding out her parental figure was damn near ball and chained to the ghost would freak her out.

“I can not leave until it is resolved. I must stay.” Tayonan cut in and Dani shot her a nasty look. The ghost held Dani’s eyes but did nothing. Vlad cleared his throat to gather Dani’s attention again and narrowed his eyes on her rudeness. Dani apologized.

“She is correct,” Vlad begins, “It has been placed upon me to figure out what is keeping her restless. Thus she must stay close. But you have nothing to worry about since you’ll be spending the summer with Daniel and his family. Before the winter comes back around and you are back home, Tayonna will be properly rested or at least back in the ghost zone.” Vlad felt upset with himself for saying that but quickly shook it off as Vladan tried to get inside his head. Vlad looked towards Tayonna and she looked away, gazing at the room around her then sighing in a defeated manner.

He felt her core pulse with a pang of sadness, he closed his eyes, took a moment, and then swallowed it down as he tried to continue eating his food. Dani didn’t like that answer, she didn’t like the idea of Vlad being alone with a ghost who could easily get inside his head. She made a mental note to talk to Danny, he would be the only one who could come up with some plan of what to do before he was packing and moving to college. Oh yeah, Danny was moving to college at the end of the summer and that was the whole point of Dani staying with him. 

Dani hated how Tayonna came during a time when things were supposed to be peachy-sweet. Danny was leaving, Dani was growing up, Vlad was settling into different businesses and being a dad. Then here came Tayonna and her girl issues while dead and Dani wanted to gag and tell her to suck it up. Dani had heard how annoying Amber and Kitty were months before she was born and how Danny hated having to deal with them. Now it felt like history was repeating itself and cursing Dani to deal with almost the same things her male counterpart dealt with, but worse. Stupid ghost with stupid feelings fucking up her family and all the things they had going for them. Dani could feel her anger bubbling and she was sure it was not due to any mind tricks. Ugh! 

“Danielle?” Vlad cocked a brow. 

“I’m tired, I’m going to bed.” Dani took a final bite of her food and then roughly placed her fork down. She pushed the plate forward before pushing out her chair. She ran over and hugged Vlad tightly and the older man was confused but quickly settled into the embrace. Dani gave one last squeeze then pulled away.

“Love you.”

“Same to you,” Vlad responded, mentally kicking himself for not being able to say it back.  “Make sure you are fully packed so I can drop you off tomorrow.” Vlad hated yelling at the dinner table but the young phantom was already out of the room.

When it was just him and Tayonna the ghost seemed almost pleased.

“She’s uncomfortable.” Tayonna poked at the food in front of her.

“I would be too if an unwanted ghost came into my house and caused trouble.” Vlad retorted sharply. He didn’t mean to sound so harsh but it was the truth. 

“I apologize.” Tayonna locked eyes with Vlad and he gulped then quickly cleaned his mouth with a napkin. He could feel that she felt bad for scaring Dani.

“With due time she will come around to the idea that you’ll be here for a while,” Vlad smirked more for himself. It was almost like playing a very strange game of house. Dani’s short temper mostly came from Vlad in his former years. Danny was a lot better at controlling unnecessary undirected anger than Vlad. Vlad would just shoot off until there was nothing left of his mockery. Dani, now going through the necessary steps of her angsty teenage years, was very much like Vlad. 

“Sometimes I wonder if our daughter would have had her father’s stoic nature or my temper.” Tayonna didn’t mean to share that with Vlad but the pull on her core begged for a connection. She secretly hoped her actions of bounding them wouldn’t backfire.

“Did he want children?” Vlad bit the inside of his cheek when the question left his lips. He felt nervous asking.

“He wanted many, I told him one would be just enough but he wanted two. A girl for whom he could teach business and a boy for whom he wanted to live freely.” Tayonna's core lit up with happiness, Vlad could feel it and it felt lovely.

“Isn’t that a bit backwards for your time?

“Forbidden by nature, not by nurture. He didn’t live by nature, he enjoyed its benefits but never truly lived by it. He followed the way his heart told him.” Tayonna gave a small smile and looked down at her hands.

“A girl learning the ways of her brothers would allow her the ability to fight. A boy learning his sister’s gives him the ability to learn to care for the things that matter most.” Vladan had spoken through Vlad and it was clear both he and Tayonna were aware of it. The girl looked uncomfortable but kept her eyes on Vlad to see what else would happen. The man felt his mind rush and then settle and he quickly reached for his drink to down it.

“Does he talk to you?” Tayonna asked just above a whisper.

“He annoys me.” Vlad tsked.

Tayonna looked always hopeful to talk to Vladan but when Vlad’s face fell to a disgruntled expression she quickly shook the feeling away. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to talk to him anyway. Vlad could sense she strongly longed for the man despite wanting to also kill him. Love was a dangerous feeling Vlad knew all too much about. Love could get scary to the point you would hurt anyone including the one you promised to cherish. Tayonna was in love just as much as she was in pain. Vlad was unfortunate to feel every ounce of that as they sat across from each other. 

“Tayonna?” Vlad called to the woman and she looked back up with him.

“Yes?”

“Can you remember what he did to make you so upset?” Vlad could feel the beating of his heart begin to race. He could hear a very faint yelling in his ear telling him Vladan was innocent. Vlad tried his best to drown it out as the woman in front of him struggled to think. Tayonna looked away trying to gather her thoughts but the more she dug through her mind she came upon blanks. Tayonna could not pinpoint any memories but rather just her anger and her sadness towards Vladan. She was restless for so long and it felt like her reason for being so became a phantom of itself. But something wasn’t right. Tayonna knew herself better than anyone else and knew that she would never be mad at Vladan if there wasn’t a good reason. She loved him more than anything in the world. She tried to think again but nothing came about it.

Vlad raised a hand to his chest and gripped his shirt as a shot of anxiety came from Tayonna.

“Tayonna?” Vlad called again and the girl began to cry.

“I don’t remember.”

[lazyworksinprogress]

I'm at work over the weekend and there is a lot to do but no one will notice if I don't do it very well so I'm listening to Hell Unearthed - Hilary McElwaine

[my thinking/unedited notes]

the author has a few moments of explaining her process and complimenting Dante's understanding of justice that jumped out to me and made me laugh because I do not hold Dante in particularly high regard when it comes to morals or ethics. Do I think Divine Comedy has an indelible historical and artistic influence? Yes. But I also think it's important to view "masterpieces" that form the bedrock of established moral justice with a healthy sense of contempt for the part those ideas have played in bringing the state of the world to *gestures to everything*.

Praising Dante by mentioning his influence on the construction of Western judicial legislation is an overtly political line to walk because those legal frameworks are not famous for being ethical, reasonable, and/or logical. I'd be happy to cop to the idea that Dante invented the first famous self-insert, RPF fanfic, set up a lot of great Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and definitely helped Hozier with the structure of his last album but I refuse to allow the thought flourish that he is an unimpeachable moral authority.

uncritically repeating the Gandhi rhetoric claiming he was a spiritually elevated person when his history of sexism, anti-Blackness is a choice that really places this adaptation in a politicised place

david bowie being in limbo for publicly following different religions and not various allegations of sexual violence is also a decision to continue to perpetuate a certain public image of these figures that is not wholly based on their actions

the political commentary is superficial and pro-West without even the nuance of Dante's original work that criticised the imperial aspirations of Florence. The "kidnapper portion" that identifies individual criminal cases like the Lindbergh kidnapping but not ones like the atrocities of the settler colonial Residential Schools or of the ways that missionary work and schooling was used to erase Aboriginal culture and separate children from their families and culture in Australia - is just one of the moments that just made me feel completely alienated from this adaptation.

it feels like there is something not entirely right when trying to fit some of these sins into the structure of the Divine Comedy. the attempt to include specific crimes of gender-based violence like genital mutilation is not handled well - it actually feels like a dog whistle when attached to a cultural story including arranged marriage - as though forced/early marriage does not also happen in Christian traditions.

There's just too many places when the choice of sin illustrates how determined the author is to ignore glaring modern examples if the case criticises the hegemonic power structure.

it's a tough adaptation to try to blend modern examples with the conservative and contradictory framework because it illustrates a lot of the logical inconsistencies and the way sin is constructed by a specific type of person. it doesn't make sense and the absurdity of ignoring things like systemic violence is frequently jarring .

[lightrises]

"Only in allowing her to pass..." — Hornet, The Radiance, and the means by which Hallownest turned its victims against each other

A quick note: I read Hollow Knight as an anti-colonialist text. As such I'll be touching on topics related to colonialism as it's depicted in the world of the game, and said analysis will reflect both a sympathetic take on The Radiance and a critique of The Pale King that won't pull its punches. If this sounds up your alley, hello and thank you for the read! Let us be sad about these bugs together.

———

So!! A while back I realized something about pre-canon that felt rather... "curious" is one way to put it, I think. To wit: for all the effort and scheming and determination The Pale King poured into trying to get rid of The Radiance, neither of his plans involved directly killing her.

Was that his long game? Well, sure, that seems clear enough. His tack changed from luring the moths away from their god and creator to a more literal form of incarceration once the infection became a factor, but at its core the end goal never really changed—The Pale King very sincerely wished to destroy Radiance via obsolescence. The Seer lends us foreshadowing to confirm as much:

[Image descriptions: Two screenshots from Hollow Knight, showing the Seer and Ghost in the Seer's alcove at the Resting Grounds. Across both screenshots, the Seer tells Ghost the following: "None of us can live forever, and so we ask those who survive to remember us. Hold something in your mind and it lives on with you, but forget it and you seal it away forever. That is the only death that matters." End description.]

(Which, by the way and given the context, talk about an extremely unsubtle allusion to cultural genocide huh!!! Whew.)

In any case, we're left with a whole bunch of machinations which build up to... well, two very roundabout attempts at committing deicide. That's kind of weird, all things considered! Why not just do the deed in one fell swoop and get it over with?

This could be for any number of reasons. Maybe the king was devoid of the means to instantly kill another higher being. Maybe his personal sense of scruples stopped him short of signing off on MURDER murder (although, y'know, the aforementioned genocide + eternal imprisonment = still cool and copasectic apparently!). Maybe the long drawn-out cruelty was the point. Maybe the idea of playing fuckign 4D chess with the circumstances was too delicious for him to pass up—that man did love to tinker and stick his claws where they sure as hell didn't belong—or maybe it was a little bit of All The Things. Who knows!!

But interrogating The Pale King's methodology on this count isn't what I'm here for, at least not really. The main reason I raise this question at all is that in her own way, Hornet did too.

"I'd urge you to take that harder path... "

See, going by The Pale King's actions and what The White Lady explicitly says, they both foresaw two outcomes wrt the infection: it can be allowed to spread, or it can be contained. At Teacher's Archives, Quirrel acknowledges the fact that Ghost is expected to do... something about this, but he doesn't elaborate on what HE thinks that's supposed to be apart from the obvious "Gotta bust into Black Egg Temple first". Hornet is the one person who presents to us—to Ghost—what's framed as a third option: confront and destroy the infection at its source.

And she doesn't bring it up like it's just another tactic for Ghost to consider, prim and indifferent to what they would do. She nudges them towards it, actively, up to the point where she throws herself into the fray against Hollow at a juncture that's uniquely dangerous to her and her alone just to make that option feasible.

Even when she's couching it in disclaimers that this is still Ghost's decision to make (and let's be fair, she's extremely not wrong about that lol), no one can pretend Hornet is unbiased. It's obvious in that buttoned-down Hornet kind of way that she is way the hell done with the increasingly tenuous stalemate that's kept Hallownest's desiccated corpse from collapsing in on itself. Personally it's hard for me not to read some Toriel Undertale-esque "My father was too entrenched in his own foolishness to pursue any course of action that would have DEFINITIVELY ended this" shade into her stance here, regardless of whether that's strictly true in canon.

And that bit—Hornet's hopes for an end to Hallownest's stasis, moreover her grim calculation of what needs to be done to get there—that's the bit I find super interesting but likewise tragic and depressing as shit, on multiple levels. In no small part because a) canon itself gestures towards Hornet feeling conflicted about the very plan she's pushing, and moreover b) she has at least two (2) damn good reasons to feel that way.

So, what do I mean by that? Let's look here first:

[Image description: A screenshot from Hollow Knight, of Hornet and Ghost inside the Temple of the Black Egg, standing in front of the unsealed egg itself. Hornet has been struck by the Dream Nail and her dialogue is displayed as follows: "... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?" End description.]

As the curtain is about to drop on things one way or another, Hornet thinks,

... Could it achieve that impossible thing? Should it?

Now, looking at that last bit it's easy to go "Oh no, Hornet's worried that Ghost won't survive killing The Radiance!" And I do think that's part of it: Hornet is, categorically, not her father. By endgame it's clear she's not content to view her Void-borne siblings as tools to be used then disposed of. She's also well aware that as a healthy autonomous Vessel amongst the countless dead, Ghost is the only person left alive who has a fighting chance against The Radiance. Knowing someone is the only qualified candidate for the job doesn't make encouraging them to embrace a probable death sentence any less of a bitter pill to swallow, though. And odds are on that this sentiment extends to Hollow too, who IS going to die no matter what happens here. To put it bluntly, it's more than reasonable to conclude that Hornet hates the absolute fuck out of this.

But I don't think that's all there is to it either. Remember what I said earlier about The Pale King's bids for genocide? Well, it's not like the man deigned to limit his efforts to just the moth tribe.

"We do not choose our mothers... "

On top of everything else—an infected Hallownest being all she's ever known, the fact that she only exists because of the infection, the list goes on—Hornet has spent her life wedged into a position that's been uncomfortable and terminally unglamorous at best: she is both a daughter of her father's kingdom and of Deepnest.

Deepnest, which like the moths and many others was here long before the wyrm and his lady wife swanned onto the scene and the God Become Bug laid claim to everything the Light touched plus a considerable amount of change. THAT Deepnest, which has fought claw and thread to retain its sovereignty against same-said settler king, and for which Herrah not only surrendered her life but also agreed to bed her worst enemy, all in hopes of securing a viable future for her people (put a pin in that last part by the way, I'll come back to it soon).

Two Worlds, One Family (Ft. An Indigenous Woman Trying Her Damndest To Work With What She's Got Versus An Imperialist Who Only Signed Up For This Because He Needed The Political Favor THAT Badly, So It's The Height Of Dysfunctional Actually). Fun times!!!!

The baggage this entails for Hornet is gnarly enough without implications made by The White Lady and the pre-canon timeline of events and even Team Cherry's dev notes that the king may well have looked at baby Hornet, gone "YOINK", then ensured she spent the lion's share of her childhood reared within the pearly auspices of his Pale Court*. That would be rather advantageous for Him Specifically after all, the potential to mold a born foe into a future ally and even have her trained in combat under the same tutelage as her doomed sibling. And far be it from him to stop a grown Hornet—his own flesh and blood too!—from making Deepnest her forever home if she so pleased. He totally wouldn't be reneging on his "fair bargain made" by doing this one simple thing until Hornet came of age, not t e c h nic c a l l y.

If that is indeed the case, there's a non-zero chance Hornet's formative years were a hot mess of cultural alienation and being a good deal more privy than most to just how much of a bastard her father could be. There's an equally non-zero chance that at some point she stood or sat within earshot as The Pale King finally, finally dropped all pretense and euphemism to name the Light for precisely what (for who) it was.

See, in conjunction with the question that started this whole dang train of thought I've been asking this one too: Does Hornet know? When she speaks of confronting "the heart of [the] infection" does she know she's talking about not just a literal person but someone very specific? The Radiance, who god though she may be shares skin in the game alongside Hornet as a native woman screwed over by the same settler king, likewise deprived of her kin and saddled with a life gone horrendously pear-shaped?

I'll assume for the sake of exploring the possibility and because I think it's a likely one anyway that yes, Hornet does know. She knows, and despite everything can't help empathizing. She might even look at Radiance and see bits and pieces both reflected and slightly inversed in her own mother: Radiance was forced to the sidelines while her people—her children, the brood she was meant to lead and care for—died out under The Pale King's rule, and it's no stretch to assume she's at least as upset about that as she has been about everything else; Herrah too took drastic measures for her people's sake, trying to head off annihilation by relegating herself to the sidelines in an act that was as much calculated risk as an attempt to find wiggle room and leverage in the face of a nasty proposition.

A calculated risk that, if things continue as they are, might well amount to nothing as the rest of Deepnest gets eaten alive by the infection. It survived The Pale King's advances for so so long, only to fall here. Herrah's sacrifice would be for naught; the other tribes—themselves the king's victims—would keep succumbing to the infection too.

And this is where things fall apart.

"... or the circumstance into which we are born."

Let's be clear: I think Hornet is wise enough to know what's what here, that all the carnage and suffering falls on her father's head for starting this slow-motion trainwreck in the first place. Hallownest wasn't always Hallownest. This domain was Radiance's home first, along with many others. It was the worm-turned-king who rolled up on the scene unsolicited and decided this was a ""'problem""" that had to be """solved""".

But the fact of the matter is that he's gone and The Radiance is here, raging, seemingly inconsolable. Above and beyond being Deepnest's rightful heir, Hornet isn't in a position to countenance more splash damage even if the grief and fury fueling it makes perfect sense. She can understand without ever bringing herself to love Radiance, and she can bend her knee to practicality even if she hates the everloving shit out of it because the fact that it "has" to end this way isn't fair.

This lends itself to one last awful conclusion: that Hornet has probably considered and (rightly or wrongly) discarded the possibility that Radiance can be saved, at least not without dragging more collateral along for the ride. If even her mother and every other enemy to the king seemed to dismiss talking Radiance down as an option way back when... well. Why should Hornet hope for any better after things have escalated so far?

Again, it's practical. A practical net good is what Hornet strives for. And again, it fucking sucks.

For extra tragedy points, this makes Hornet's extended crypticness around Ghost followed by her last minute casting about for a reason to tell them "Wait, don't; not just yet" that she never voices even more of a gut punch. She can't bring herself to burden Ghost with the context that haunts her so, least of all when it might weaken their resolve to go through with what (she thinks) needs doing.

It's the "same song, different verse" which led to the mantis tribe and Deepnest being pitted against each other: Hallownest rigged the game so that two women who could have been powerful allies—who have a mutual vested interest in driving out settler rule—wound up poised as enemies instead. And how awful is that? The king for all his being extremely fucking dead still gets the last laugh, because outside of a miracle the game never manifests Hornet can salvage what her mother started and look forward to a future where Deepnest pulls itself back from the brink if and only if The Radiance dies.

Resolution comes at the price of a completed genocide. Add two more dead siblings to the unconscionable pile thereof, while we're at it. That's what it boils down to whether or not Hornet can bear to articulate it as such, and there's no grace or even a properly bittersweet ending to wring from this clusterfuck. And that is rough.

———

* This has been better explained elsewhere, but a quick rundown: The White Lady tells Ghost that Hornet and Herrah "were permitted little time together." On its surface this can be taken to mean that Hornet was still very young when Herrah was shipped off to Eternal Dreamland—except this doesn't jive with the fact that we meet Hornet as an adult. If the stasis kicked in once the Dreamers went to their rest, which in turn halted the aging process for every living bug in Hallownest, AND before all this Hornet experienced little by the way of quality time with her birth mother... I think you can see where I'm going with this.

To top it off we've got Team Cherry weighing in ominously from their dev notes on Herrah: "As part of the agreement for her alliance and her role as a dreamer, King gave her a child (Hornet). Was she allowed to keep this child or was she taken away?" This isn't confirmation by itself of course, but given additional canon details (see above): Can I get a "yikes" in the chat fellas.

[transformersmr-hq]

TFMR Daily random facts - Day 08

Random Worldbuilding/Character facts about Transformers: mobius run universe

Random facts about Neocybex (2-2/3)

Many Dialects of Neocybex - 2/3

Urayan

According to the linguists, there might have been a theoretical common ancestor of all dialects that exists on the planet. If this so-called "proto-dialect" ever actually existed, then Urayan is probably the closest among all its descendant dialects. For such reason, Urayan is ometimes referred to as "the firstborn of all dialects".

From pronunciations to grammatical structures, Urayan influence can be found throughout dialects that are spoken in regions bordering Uraya, such as Praxian, Altihexian, Protihexan and many more. Even Iaconian has quite a number of Urayan-originated words in its lexicon.

Cybertronians often say Urayan is one of the easiest foreign dialect to learn. Urayans can say the same thing about alomst every other dialects they come across.

Camien

A variant of Urayan spoken in the colony planet of Caminus. Camien originated from old Urayan, which was the dialect the first settlers used.

Thanks to the settlers' strong effort to preserve their Cybertronian heritage, the dialect could be preserved in near perfect condition for a very long time while the mainland Urayan went through various altercations. After some time, the difference between these two became distinctive enough to be considered seperate dialects.

One thing curious about Camien lexicon is that it contains words that even Camiens aren't sure what they exactly mean. For example, they have two words that describes their companions within their familial unit: 'Brother', and 'Sister'. They know who to call a sister or a brother, but when they are asked "why is this person a 'brother/sister'?", they can't provide any explanations. They know it by experience, but they have no idea why it works like so. It's like gendered nouns in European languages, where one knows a 'chocolate' is a 'female' but can't explain why it is so.

As to why there are words with such concept despite the fact that Cybertronians have no biological gender, it still remains a mystery to this day.

Vosian

Before the Grand Unification, All that's known about Vosian was that it is a 'language of flying barbarians'. But once the city-state's rich and uniqe culture was revealed to the world in forms of art, music, architecture and glamorous Vosian upper class lifestyle, the dialect also gained equal recognition and popularity.

Vosian has unique accents that makes the speech sound 'melodic' and 'elegant'. On the other hand, there are people who finds these accents rather 'distracting', or 'overly pompous'.

Vosian dialect is divided into two kind: High Spire Vosian, and Common Vosian. High Spire is the speech of royals, nobles, scholars and other people of high status, while Common is literally the speech of common folks. High spire sounds more smooth and refined, wheras Common sounds more rythmic and lively.

According to the survey conducted by several large universities across Cybertron, Vosian was recorded as third most popular foreign language to study, next to Iacon(1st place) and Urayan(2nd place).

Groundframes or flightframes without visible wings (i.e. Helicopters) may never be able to properly speak Vosian no matter how much they study. This is because there's another important form of Vosian other than sopken or written.

Vosian Wingspeech 

Vosian wingspeech is a type of body language that is delivered through movements of back-mounted wings. Whenever a Vosian speaks, Wingspeech follows too.

In Common Vosian, the wingspeech is little more than gestures that emphasize certain meanings or feelings. Wing movements involved in the speech often happenes unconsciously, so even those who are not familiar with reading wings can approximate the meaning of the movement.

Things are different in High Spire Vosian, where the wingspeech is called "Courtyard Speech". It started as some fancy form of secret handshake that royals used to communicate without nobles overhearing them, and then later widely spread to the upper class in general.

The speaker moves their wings consciously in a series of complicated motions, as if building a sentence in spoken language. Thanks to this, a Vosian noble can speak two different things at once. Often the nobles would speak something and then speak something that contradicts their spoken words. In this case, it's better to bet on the Wingspeech being the real message.

There's only one kind of groundframes that can learn Wingspeech, and that's Praxians. Thanks to the doorwings they are born with, they can learn how to speak Wingspeech up to some level. They are surprisingly good at reading someone's Wings, despite the fact that Praxians themselves have never invented their own wingspeech. 

[chalcid]

8: Reemai of the Brambles (Disappear)

I glanced at the rain outside the window, and then at the TV.

"Meteorologists are saying that we are entering the rainy season early this year," The person on TV said "But not everyone is feeling gloomy about this turn of events. A nine-year-old Water Elementalist from the center of the island just figured out how to make your own water umbrella-"

I turned off the TV.  "Come on, why won't you let me outside?"

"It's raining, Merika," Mom sighed.

"Yes," I said, gesturing at the window "It's raining. Why am I not outside? Outside is where all the puddles are. I should be splashing in them! I should be finding cool rocks and things washed up on the beach."

"I don't want to get out the shoe dryer..."

"The weather people say that the rainy season is starting, Mom. And I'm out of indoor things to do and this house is suffocating me," I sighed.

"I don't want you walking around in the rain for no reason, Merika."

"I just gave you, like, five."

"Merika..."

"Fine," I snapped "You want reason? You want me to wander with purpose? I'll give it to you."

I whirled my coat dramatically and stormed up to my room.

It was the best room in the house if I did say so myself. Technically, it was the attic, but it had all of my stuff, therefore it was a room. The back wall was actually a large triangular window, covered with an old table cloth because Uncle Decimus couldn't figure out how to set up curtains or blinds for it.

I flung myself on my bed dramatically and whipped out my phone. What sorts of trouble could I get up to today, and who could join me.

I called Trite first, but he didn't pick up his phone. Next, I tried Poseikion

"Hey, what are you guys up to," I asked "Anyone down for an adventure?"

"Trite's baked almost half the recipes in his new cookbook today alone," Poseikion reported. "And Pacifinos hasn't left their room at all today. So I'm just going to assume that their answer would be no."

"And you?"

"I'd love to, but I'm ultra grounded until I turn in those four math assignments I missed, so I can't," he paused. "Actually, I'm not even supposed to be talking to you, so I gotta run."

"Understandable, good luck," I said just before he hung up.

It was a long shot, but maybe Edonia would like to hang out.

She cleared her throat. "Hello, Merika."

"Heyyy," I said, "Wanna go on an adventure?"

"Uh..." she paused. "Anything specific in mind?"

"We could grab snacks," I suggested, "Or check out the library if you want."

"Those are remarkably un-Merika activities."

"To be completely honest," I told her "I just want to be outside, but my mom won't let me without a specific task in mind. We could also hunt for lost treasure or go looking for pretty shells or break into a building if you want to, but I figured those weren't really your thing."

"Thanks, how thoughtful of you," Edonia said "But-"

One of her sisters yelled "Oh, come on, Eddy, you're always cooped up in that tower bedroom of yours. How about you do something that's not practicing ancient evil magics or getting into heated debates about dead people."

A chorus of people yelled in response "The violin isn't evil, you're just jealous you don't have the magic."

"Okay, fine. Meet me at Bramble Woods, there are supposed to be some really old ruins over there."

"Like, human-age old?"

"No,  just from the first failed colonization attempt."

"Oh. Cool, cool, meet you there."

I hung up and raced downstairs.

"Okay, Mom," I shouted as I pulled my raincoat over my other coat "I've found a purpose to wander for, now. I'd say I'll be back before dinner time, but we both know I'm not even going to try. Bye Mom, love ya!"

Kev ran up to me "Where are you going?"

"Bramble Woods," I informed her.

"But that's really far," she protested.

"Yeah," Lawrence said, popping his head out from behind the couch back. "Like eighty million miles away."

"Not that far," I said.

"Four and a half miles," Kev said "I think?"

"Sounds about right to me."

"You're just going to walk that far all alone?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm coming with you," she said stubbornly.

"Kev, you don't even have a raincoat."

She responded by opening the closet and putting on one of dad's raincoats, and despite the fact she was practically swimming in the coat, she still pulled off the look far better than he did.

"Are you really sure," I said "I'll be fine, but you're more of an indoor person."

"A good sister wouldn't let her sister go that far alone," Kev said stubbornly.

Damn, these kids were really committed to the whole sibling idea. I couldn't help but feel bad.

"Are you sure," I repeated "Because I'm going to meet up with a friend and then we're going to walk in the woods. And then we'll have to walk home. That's a lot of walking."

"I'm sure," Kev said.

"Fine, but if you tire yourself out, I cannot give you a piggyback ride," I said.

I was sure to go slower than normal for Kev's sake. It took us forever to get there, but we made it eventually, soaked.

"Hey, Merika," Edonia said. She was holding a black umbrella. "Who's this?"

"This is Kev," I said. "She's..." I trailed off. I couldn't say 'stepsister'. I wasn't emotionally ready for that. "She's Kev," I concluded stupidly "She insisted on coming with me, so don't, y'know, freak out that I dragged a child through the rain for four miles."

"That far," Edonia commented, surprised.

"Four and a half," Kev mumbled.

"Wow. I thought one of your many parents would drive you here."

"Could everyone stop with the parent jokes?" I sighed.

"May I stand underneath your umbrella, please, miss" Kev asked Edonia.

"Sure thing, muffin," Edonia said, making room for Kev. Absently, she helped roll up Kev's sleeves. "Why didn't you bring one?"

"Umbrellas are for the weak," I declared.

Edonia rolled her eyes at me.

"Right" I cleared my throat "Let's see some cool ruins, eh?

The first half an hour or so went by fairly uneventfully. The woods, as woods do, got darker and weirder the further we went in. Kev and Edonia talked about the books they were reading, and Edonia had several recommendations for her.

A two-headed deer runs past us. Edonia put her hand over Kev's mouth to stop her from screaming.

I, on the other hand,  possessed no fear or common sense. I raised my cellphone and took a picture.

Edonia's sharp intake of breath told me that was very bad.

The deer sniffed the air and screamed with both mouths, pursuing other prey or maybe declaring war. Who knows.

We all breathed a collective sigh of relief.

"Merika, they eat people," Edonia hissed "And they're very sensitive to light. You better thank your lucky charms that that phone wasn't on flash because otherwise, we'd all be dead. That's why the first colony packed up and left, by the way. Because seventeen people were eaten."

"Did those things used to be all over the island," Kev asked fearfully.

"Not all over the island. They had much more territory to themselves, but they mostly just lived here. I never thought I'd actually get to see a Calandra Deer myself," Edonia said.

"Any other weird creatures we might run into?" I asked.

Edonia scrunched her eyebrows together "I'm a little too panicked to remember."

We glanced at Kev.

"Do you want us to head home?" I asked her

"I'm fine," she said, but there was a slight quiver in the voice.

"I mean, we don't know where the ruins are, and it's really creepy here," I said"No judgment if you want to go home?"

"I do, but I want to finish this," Kev said.

"Understandable, let me know the second you change your mind," I said.

We plodded along the old trail, not daring to speak.  A person-shaped shadow darted along beside us, just off the trails. Two crows flew off.

I was beginning to doubt everything I've been ever taught about the way the world works. This place was haunted, more haunted than most places with actual ghosts. I've been in shipwrecks, and there are plenty of skeletons and the meanest, saltiest ghosts you can imagine, but none of those put the fear of the universe into me like here.

Nobody believes or speaks of the Wild Magic anymore. I think I picked up a library book about it once but I couldn't actually finish it. At the time, it was because the author who had written it believed in it so deeply that I couldn't stop laughing, but now I believed.

Some things just don't fit into the way the world works.

"So," Kev said "What's in these ruins?"

"Well, it's the remnants of the first attempt to colonize on Ilcodeux," Edonia said animatedly "Or, Wildeeria, as people called it back then. People don't like talking about that one. A hundred and fifty years before Ilcodeux was even a notion, a group of settlers, led by Erina Wild, founded Wilderia and built the town near a lake in the middle of the forest-"

"-so we're looking for a lake?"

"Yes! Anyways, the colony was built here due to the large quantities of an unusual wood, instrument-grade stuff. This place used to be worth a fortune-"

Then I tripped on an especially large root and I fell right off the trails. My face was buried in red grass that smelled like bacon. I peeled myself off the ground and glanced directly into the face of the most terrifying shadowy monster person I have ever seen.

Credit to me, I didn't scream, but I did stare at the person in a way of shock and horror that no doubt made them sad.

They were actually made of shadow, except for three glittering scarlet eyes, two on the right, one on the left.

"Wait," they said, "I know you from somewhere."

They dragged a shadowy claw underneath my chin. "You're that girl Thordis has a soft spot for, right?"

"I don't remember you," I squeaked bravely.

"Ah, yes, you wouldn't. Not when I was like this."

They snapped and with a swirl of magic, they looked like a normal person. Their hair, I noted, was the same color as their eyes were in their other form.

I tried to drag the name from the depths of my memory "Reemun? No, wait, Reemal?"

They sighed "Reemai."

"Oh, sorry," I said nervously "You're in her band, though? How can you play guitar when you're..." I trailed off "Not an Instrumentalist."

"Wild Magic, darling," Reemai wiggled their fingers "It can disguise itself as other things very easily."

"Oh," I said "That's nice."

"But nevermind that," Reemai said "What are you doing in these woods?"

"Searching for ruins," I said. "With my friend and... ah screw it, it doesn't matter. Please just put me back now."

"Okay, if that's what you want," Reemai said, "Or I could take you to the ruins."

"Can't you just direct me to them," I asked? "I really need to get back to my geeks, and we already encountered a Calandra Deer so I'm a little on edge."

"Of course, of course," Reemai said soothingly "On one condition-"

"-my soul is not up for grabs-"

"-You buy me a coffee. And I get to choose when and where."

"Deal," I said reluctantly.

"Very well. Follow the swords to get to the ruins."

"What," I asked, but Reemai snapped their fingers and suddenly, the world was a swirl of black and red.

"Follow the swords," a chorus of things in the dark whispered, "Follow the swords."

[solivar]

Massacre In Deadlock Gorge

A special report by Olivia Colomar of Paranormal New Mexico.

Deadlock Gorge.

It’s a name that catches the imagination almost immediately, harkening back as it does to the days of the Wild West, of handsome cowboys and grizzled old prospectors, wagon trains full of tenderfoot settlers, Pony Express riders and stagecoaches and the black-hatted outlaws who robbed them all. That is, of course, not its only name -- only the most recent, and likely the most famous, for a variety of reasons.

The Ancestral Puebloans left ruins there, as they did in so many other high-walled canyons in the Four Corners, but even now their descendants do not give it a name. In fact, my regular Puebloan cultural experts flatly refused to speak with me about the place at all. The Spanish settlers who made their homes around Albuquerque called it El Cañon del Viento Cortante, the Canyon of the Biting Wind, though its position tends to be rather nomadic on antique maps of the region housed in the University of New Mexico Anthropology Department’s library. The Navajo bands who were its closest neighbors simply called it the Hungry Place and shunned it with astonishing enthusiasm given the presence of readily available water, arable land at its widest point, and the shelter to be found within its network of water-carved sandstone caves. Today it lies entirely inside the boundaries of the expanded Navajo Reservation Annex and is only desultorily patrolled by Navajo Nation police. It came by its present name, of course, thanks to the infamous Deadlock Gang, who used it as their base of operations as they marauded across Native communities and Anglo settlements, prospecting outfits and isolated ranches, before the final bloody confrontation within the canyon’s walls brought an end to their reign of terror.

In fact, Deadlock Gorge appears to have had a rather significant history of violence, stretching back as far into history as I’ve been able to research and very much extending to the present day. It was, as of this writing, only ten years ago that the art colony established there by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters came to a grisly and, to date, unexplained end.

*

It was just after midnight on October 29th when the call came in to McKinley County 911. Veteran operator Melissa Rosales received that first frantic call for help.

Melissa Rosales is a petite woman who wears her graying brown hair in an asymetrical style that flatters her pixieish face. Her eyes are framed in crow’s feet and the years have gifted her with a generous portion of laugh lines. She is smiling as we sit down together at Cafe Pasqual to talk once she’s done her shift. She still works at the county 911 office, as a supervisor, and she says that, over the years, she has received many calls that have stayed with her: the young family caught in their vehicle in the midst of rising flood waters during a freakishly powerful storm, the two year old bitten by a rattlesnake in her family’s garden, more than one car accident involving drunken college students and long haul transport rigs on the interstate. None of them haunt her like the frantic cries that came from Deadlock Gorge that night in October ten years ago.

“It was almost Halloween, and it was a full moon -- that whole week was crazy, weird calls every day. The night before, someone called to report a chupacabra raiding their compost bin. Can you believe it?” Melissa laughs, shaking her head, but the humor doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It isn’t always like that on the full moon but that month, it surely was. When the first calls came in, Ms. Colomar, I freely confess that we didn’t know what to believe.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #1 12:07 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Unidentified Woman:

Help...please help…

911 Operator:

We will certainly do so, ma’am, but I need you to tell me where you are.

Unidentified Woman:

Deadlock...We’re...We’re in Deadlock Gorge, just off 66, the Starry Desert Center For the Arts -- [static] -- ter’s residency at the edge of town. Something --

911 Operator:

Ma’am, could you please tell me the nature of the emergency? Do you need fire and rescue services? Emergency medical services? Police?

Unidentified Woman:

I -- I -- I don’t know I don’t know. I’m at the window, the front window of the writer’s residency parlor and and I see...someone’s lying in the street. They’re not moving, they’re not moving, I think they might be dead, the street lights are out I can’t -- [static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am can you hear me? [pause] Ma’am?

Unidentified Woman:

[whispering] I hear something right outside. I can hear it breathing. I think it can hear me, too. Oh God I think it can hear me too.

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

“There are all sorts of weird stories about the Gorge -- I sure you’ve heard more than a few of them.” Melissa fiddles with her necklace as she speaks, a delicate silver chain hung with turquoise beads, a strangely nervous gesture for a woman who otherwise comes across as bedrock settled, coolly calm and collected. “That it’s haunted, that it’s cursed, you know how it is. I was half convinced, given how close it was to Halloween, that it could be some kind of stupid prank, college kids with nothing better to do. Then the second call came in.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #2 12:12 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Anita Colomar (Writer’s Residency Director at Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences):

Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences, 66 Canyon Drive, in Deadlock Gorge. Please send police and emergency medical services.

911 Operator:

Ma’am, can you tell me the nature of the emergency?

Anita Colomar:

I’m...not entirely certain myself. Power is out in the gorge -- I heard an...I don’t want to say an explosion but...it could have been. It was loud -- loud enough to wake me and several of the residents out of a sound sleep and --

[A high-pitched sound cuts across the recording, followed by several seconds of intense static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?

Anita Colomar:

Yes -- yes, I can hear you. Did you hear that?

911 Operator:

Yes, I did. That was at your end?

Anita Colomar:

It was. I think -- was that coming from outside? Candace, can you see?

[Inaudibly muffled voices from off the line, a sequence of loud bangs, a short scream that terminates abruptly]

Jeff, Candy, push my dresser in front of the door. Hurry. Officer, I think someone may be inside the residency building --

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

I suppose I should confess, at this point, that my interest in the incident that took place at the Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences -- the so-called Massacre In Deadlock Gorge -- is not entirely one of a neutral observer. My aunt, my father’s younger sister, Anita Colomar, was the director of the writer’s residency at the time and one of the few people to have verifiable contact with emergency services on the night of the incident itself. In fact, the woman sitting across from me was, in all likelihood, one of the last people to ever speak to her.

“I dispatched police as soon as the first call came in.” Melissa says, her tone quiet and apologetic, as though she has something to apologize for. “When the second came in, I also dispatched emergency services. And after that, well…”

My FOIA request to the McKinley County 911 dispatch office for calls related to the incident in Deadlock Gorge yielded eighty-seven individual call records and associated transcripts concentrated in a single twenty-five minute period between 12:07 am and 12:32 am. Most of the calls are no more than a few seconds long and consist almost entirely of static, snatches of loud noises, and incoherent voices. Cellular contact with the Gorge failed entirely by no later than 12:33 am. The first law enforcement responders arrived at the edge of the canyon three minutes later. The motivators and antigrav units in their vehicles failed as they crossed beneath the sandstone arch that marks the entrance to the town proper, forcing them to approach the cluster of darkened structures clinging to the mid-canyon escarpment on foot. What they found once they arrived exceeded the expectations of even the most experienced officers but not those of the dispatchers, whose lines had by then fallen eerily silent.

“I’m sorry that we couldn’t do more that night, though to this day I’m not sure if there was more to do.” Melissa tells me as we step outside into the warm summer evening, ten years removed from the cold and dark of that night. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

*

Deadlock Gorge first enters the “modern” historical record in documents dating from the early 1700s, copies of reports written to and by the assorted Spanish colonial governors of Villa de Alburquerque, as the city was known at that time, a strategic military outpost along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. It was this military significance, and resultant presence of a fairly hefty armed garrison, that led the rancheros living west of the city -- in what is today McKinley County -- to repeatedly beg the assistance of their governor when it came to keeping marauders out of their flocks. The ranchers mostly raised sheep (for their wool -- early Albuquerque was a major center for the New World textiles trade) and goats (for their meat and milk) and in the autumn of 1711, something was taking a sizeable chunk out of that trade, whole flocks, and whole shepherds, going missing. Evidence suggested that the missing livestock and farmers were disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, into El Cañon del Viento Cortante, a deep, twisting canyon of red sandstone walls, one end of which formed a natural border between several different ranching concerns.

The wealthy Spanish landowners were losing money hand over fist, they were having trouble retaining trustworthy workers, and they insisted, in a flurry of letters growing gradually shriller as the year wore on, that the governor had to send troops to help rout out the source of their trouble. Frankly, they suspected marauding natives clever enough to cover up the evidence of the depredations. Finally aggravated beyond endurance by all the whining, from sheep ranchers and wool merchants alike, a detachment of soldiers under an experienced native-fighting commander was sent to investigate the situation in El Cañon del Viento Cortante, kill whatever needed to be killed, soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, and return with proof that the matter was handled.

The detachment never returned.

In fact, nothing of them was ever seen or heard from again. No remains were ever found. No indications of battle -- pitched or otherwise -- were found. No evidence of ambush, either. The local Native bands who came to trade in Albuquerque disclaimed any knowledge of the thefts or the fate of the Spanish soldiers but issued an unusually blunt warning: El Cañon del Viento Cortante was not a good place, was not a safe place, and that was why no member of any band not insane, desperate, or outcast chose to make a home there. It would be best if the Spaniards left it alone, as well.

The governor of Albuquerque quietly arranged for the ranchers to be compensated for their losses and urged them to abandon the territory immediately surrounding El Cañon del Viento Cortante. Fragmentary records exist to suggest this may have happened -- or that the ranchers, like their unfortunate herds, employees, and soldiers, also vanished into the hungry maw of the canyon.

*

Sergeant Andrew Flores of the New Mexico State Police was the first police responder to reach Deadlock Gorge on the night of the incident, followed closely by three black-and-white cruisers rerouted from patrols in nearby communities. He organized the group and led them into town on foot after all their vehicles failed, more or less simultaneously. He recounts the way the night unfolded to me as we sit together in the living room of his trim little cabin outside Chimayó, drinking iced tea and eating a meal he has prepared using the vegetables grown in his own garden. He retired from the State Police three years ago and settled down in this vibrant little town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to write his memoirs and to raise heirloom produce for sale in the local farmer’s market. He does, in fact, have plenty to write about but, even so, the incident in Deadlock Gorge stands out in his memory as the strangest of many strange experiences.

“It’s a cliche but I guess that’s for a reason,” Former Officer Flores laughs, shaking his head slightly. “‘Twas a dark and stormy night,’ you know? The moon was full -- I recall that vividly -- but it hardly mattered because heavy weather was rolling in from the north and the moon was playing hide and seek with the clouds. One minute it was almost as bright as noon, shining off the canyon walls and the streets and the buildings, and the next it was as dark as the bottom of a well, no lights anywhere except ours, not even battery powered emergency lights.”

The town of Deadlock Gorge is built atop a midlevel escarpment a couple hundred feet down from the rim of the canyon at its extreme northern and narrowest end, straddling a relatively short and dangerously curvy stretch of Historic Route 66 that exits the canyon headed west, into Arizona. That particular stretch of HR 66 was, at one point, a shepherd’s trail, used to usher flocks of sheep and goats between one pasturage and another, and then a wagon trail, used by settlers traveling west, hopefully to California. The original town sprung up to tend to the needs of weary travelers and consisted of a boarding house, a saloon, a dry goods store, a livery stable, and a blacksmith. Of those original buildings, only the boarding house survived the raid that put an end to the Deadlock Gang -- survived it in good enough condition that efforts were made to preserve it by the New Mexico State Historical Society and, when the land was later purchased by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters, it was rehabbed into a part of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. Specifically, it was the building used to house the members of the residential writer’s program and its presence, at the edge of town, made it the first structure the investigating officers encountered on their way in.

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photo #1:

The structure is longer than it is wide, owing to the relatively narrow slice of land on which the town is built, two stories of clapboard siding painted a slaty blue-gray under a steeply pitched shingled roof, studded with windows flanked in functional shutters, an unenclosed patio/porch extending nearly to the street in front. A sign bolted to the facade over the front door identifies it as the Starry Desert Center Writer’s Residence; a plaque next to the door identifies it as a building on the State Register of Historic Places. The door itself hangs open on one twisted hinge barely clinging to the splintered wood of the frame.

Crime Scene Photos #2, 3, 4, 5 - 13:

The interior of the Writer’s Residence, ground floor. A steep staircase stands just inside the front door, leading to the second floor. To the left of the staircase lies the parlor: a collection of mismatched furniture (a sectional couch, a smaller semi-matching loveseat, a selection of chairs, a coffee table) sits in a rough circle. No holotank or sound system but a high capacity ceramic space heater designed to resemble a 19th century cast iron wood stove occupies the far corner. The signs of a struggle are obvious: an area rug covering the hardwood floor is rucked up; the coffee table lies on its side, glass top smashed, fragments scattered around it; something dark stains both the rug and the floor and more than a few pieces of glass.

To the right lies the dining room, a single long table surrounded by a dozen chairs, one of which, at the far end near the entrance to the kitchen, sits askew from its place. A glass-fronted hutch sits at the far end of the room, containing the residency’s good China, one door marked by a smeared, dark handprint.

In the kitchen, the back door stands open into the breezeway linking it to the fenced-off herb/vegetable garden occupying the next plot over. Pots hang over the prep island, undisturbed, and all of the cabinets are closed. A single piece of cutlery is missing from the knife block sitting on the prep island.

Bedrooms line the second floor hallway, most of them in states of profound disarray, as though the occupants were woken abruptly. At least one was partially barricaded from the inside. The attic lofts, containing quiet study space, appear untouched.

[End Sidebar]

“The initial 911 contact indicated that the caller saw a body lying in the street.” Copies of the crime scene photos taken in the days after that night are spread out on the patio table between us -- we have adjourned outside to enjoy the fine weather as the day fades into evening and the view of the aspen-clad mountains, already beginning their autumnward turn. “We didn’t find a body -- a splotch of blood where a body might have been, and drag marks that led right to the edge of the escarpment, but no body. In fact, we didn’t find any bodies of any kind until we got into the basement of the Center’s admin building, down in the storage rooms.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photo #14, 15:

A dark pool in the middle of the road, stretched into several smaller, splotchier pools amid obvious drag marks that terminate at the south rim of the escarpment.

The photographer must have leaned uncomfortably far out over the side to get a shot of the canyon floor at the base of the escarpment, a mass of loose scree and brush, also containing no body or bodies.

[End Sidebar]

Most of the Center’s larger buildings -- the writers’ and artists’ residences, the main administrative building, the gallery display space, the shell of what was intended to be a small performance theater, still under construction at the time of the incident, were built hard against the canyon wall. The building that housed studio space for artists and sculptors, the kiln house, the materials storage outbuildings, were constructed closer to the escarpment rim, inside a waist-high guard rail fence further reinforced with decorative iron rods strung with hurricane webbing. Nobody wanted anyone to accidentally stroll off the side.

“By the time we reached the first of the production buildings, another couple black-and-whites and a few more Staties had arrived, so I felt a little more comfortable splitting the group into search parties.” Mr. Flores chuckles and shakes his head. “I...really can’t explain in words how eerie the whole scenario was -- that night was surreal in a way I’ve never experienced, before or since. The wind was howling down the canyon like a living thing -- and not any living thing, a living thing with fangs and claws that hated us all and wanted us to die. Some of the guys swore up and down that night and for days after that they heard voices in it.”

“Did you?” I feel compelled to ask, as I leaf through his personal casefile on the incident -- he’s got more pictures than are available even through FOIA requests, and he will later graciously copy them for me.

“Not...really.” He pauses, takes a sip of his tea, refuses to meet my eyes. “I heard something...but I wouldn’t call it a voice. Not words, at any rate. I split the group into two teams, one under my command, the other under Major Hathaway, and we proceeded deeper into town.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #16 - 20:

The building containing the art studio space is a two-story structure built in a roughly crescent shape along the widest part of the escarpment rim -- a blocky central building containing a foyer scattered with a mismatched assortment of chairs and a lumpy ancient futon, a unisex bathroom setup, and two projecting wings containing studios for traditional media art, digital art, photography, textile art, and sculpture. Most of the studio spaces have enormous windows overlooking the canyon itself.

The glass-fronted door of the studio space is smashed and the door itself hanging open. Traces of blood adhere to the door and create a path up the stairs to one of the sculpture studios on the second floor. The window of that studio is broken from the inside -- glass fell into the narrow strip of land behind the studio and between the safety fence. The break itself is small, as though something were flung through the window with great force.

The blood trail ends completely in the upstairs sculpture studio.

[End Sidebar]

“Major Hathaway’s group took the escarpment side of the town and then circled around the far end toward the spot where they were building the theater. Most of what they found was concentrated in the arts studio -- none of the storage outbuildings were touched, they were all padlocked shut, until they came to the new construction.” He slides a photograph across to me, one I had heard referenced by my contacts among the State and local police forces, but which I have never seen until now. “And that was some weird shit, let me tell you.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #21 - 28:

Multiple views of the semi-complete outdoor theater/amphitheater. What would have been the stage is no more than a skeletal hint of a structure but the seating is more or less complete: low-backed wooden benches sitting on top of elaborately carved sandstone supports in two concentric semi-circles, four rows each, with an aisle between them.

At the end of the aisle, in front of what would have been the stage, is the remains of a large firepit dug several inches into the underlying stone, ringed in more stones, containing the remains of a large bonfire. The stones ringing the firepit are likewise elaborately carved in a style distinctly different from the bench supports: they are jagged, appear to be broken from several larger stones, and are covered in petroglyphs: perfectly executed circles lined inside with triangular forms, inward-turning spirals, concentric bullseye figures surrounded in a dozen smaller circles around the outer edge. Some of them are splashed with a dark semi-liquid substance.

The two rows of benches closest to the fire are covered in upholstered throw cushions and a few throw blankets here and there. Discarded clothing is scattered between them. Half-hidden beneath someone’s sports bra and semi-buried in the sand is a knife, its hilt carved from horn of some sort partially wrapped in leather, its blade roughly leaf-shaped and made of carefully shaped obsidian.

[End Sidebar]

“There were rumors, of course -- had been for years. You can’t put a bunch of artsy-fartsy types out in the middle of nowhere, have minimal interaction with the outside world, and not have rumors. And where there’s rumors, there’s complaints.” Mr. Flores hands over a sheaf of papers: noise complaints, public disturbance complaints, the basic legal nuisances used to make nontraditional communities miserable when there’s no other way to do it. “We investigated, of course, but the Center was, for a pack of allegedly immoral bohemian libertines, pretty hard on the straight and narrow. Minors were not allowed to apply for residency even if they would be legal adults before the residency started. Minimum age of participation in any program was twenty-one. Zero tolerance policy for drug or alcohol abuse or for sexual harassment. Which isn’t to say that they were perfectly squeaky clean. We got called a couple times from inside for domestic disturbances, because they allowed couples to apply together, and residents to bring plus ones if they could pony up for it, and even the best couples sometimes don’t stay that way. But nothing like this.” He shakes his head. “Nothing even close. Certainly nothing to indicate that they directors were actually running a cult.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #29 - 40:

The interior of the artists’ residency in a now-familiar state of disarray: evidence of attempts by the residents to secure themselves in their rooms, apparently to no avail, indicators of a struggle in some instances, including blood spatter on the walls, on the floor, in one case across the ceiling.

Inside the central administration building, the destruction is even more significant. The shelves in the community lending library are reduced to kindling, the books themselves to little more than empty covers lost amid snowdrifts of shredded pages. The main office has been completely destroyed: metal desks twisted apart, their fragments embedded in the walls and the floor. Not a single computer or other piece of technology escapes destruction.

The downstairs storage rooms, where the community stored years of hardcopy records in filing boxes and cabinets, are strangely untouched, though all the doors have been torn off their hinges.

At the far end of the corridor stands one intact door: solid wood, carved with a sequence of glyphs similar to those on the stones outside around the firepit. A second and thematically distinct set of carvings adorns the frame. Inside the room stands a single object: a cage consisting of heavy forged iron bars sunk into eight inch thick wooden railroad ties, slightly more than six feet long and three feet wide, containing a thin pallet, a pillow, and a blanket. All three items are bloody and a pool of the same spreads out from beneath the cage.

The bars of the cage are meticulously carved with glyphs identical to those on the door and the doorframe, as are the railroad ties. Two sets of iron manacles, one attached to the head of the cage by a heavy length of chain, the other to the foot, are similarly marked though in the case of both it seems as though the manacles and the chain were cast in that design. The door of the cage is secured with a heavy padlock of similar manufacture.

The walls, the floor, and even the ceiling are covered in concentric lines of the same visual script, some images repeating from the door to the cage to the rocks around the firepit, some completely different.

In the far corner of the room, the only example of actual human remains recovered in Deadlock Gorge that night: a human hand, roughly severed just above the wrist, ragged ends of bone clearly visible. Nearby lies a second obsidian knife, its blade and handle bloodstained.

[End Sidebar]

“We found the kid downstairs -- we might not have found him at all, but one of the officers in my search group thought she saw something moving at the head of the stairs that led down to the storage area.” Mr. Flores pours himself another glass of iced, drinks, stares out into the deepening twilight for several minutes. “He...was not in a good way -- it was lucky Hathaway had her lockpicking tool on her, because otherwise we’d never have gotten those manacles open. I don’t think Forensics ever actually found the key to the damn things. We had to jimmy all the locks just to get him out and there wasn’t much he could do to help, hurt as he was. The EMTs told me he was lucky to be alive -- one of the stab wounds nicked the abdominal aorta and he was in the process of bleeding to death internally when we found him. The blood on the knife we found was his. The hand belonged to Val Kalloway, the Center’s director of operations, according to the fingerprints.” A humorless smile. “We never did find anyone else.”

In fact, none of the experts brought in to examine Deadlock Gorge after that night found anything else. In the days and weeks that followed, law enforcement officials from Federal, State, and local agencies combed every inch of the town and the canyon beyond for any trace of the missing inhabitants of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. There were four writers plus the program director on site for the September through December residency term; there were six artists plus the art residency director. The Director of Operations and six members of the permanent instruction staff plus two administrative personnel lived in a smaller residence behind the main administration building.

Twenty-one people disappeared without a trace that night. Cadaver-sniffing dogs found no evidence of hidden human remains, either in the town or in the canyon. The forensic scientists who processed the scene found copious evidence of habitation by the the people who were supposed to be there but no evidence whatsoever of any invaders, intruders, or involvement by outside individuals. The lone survivor -- a juvenile male listed as John Doe in the official documentation of the incident -- was transported via ambulance to the University Hospital. It is my understanding that he survived, despite the severity of his injuries and his overall condition, which was something other than ideal, and that he gave an official statement to the authorities. Both that statement, and the documents confirming his identity, are sealed by Federal district court order and have never been released to the public. A FOIA request I made in regard to this issue was summarily rejected.

Mr. Flores gifted me a copy of his entire casefile on the incident -- the so-called “Massacre In Deadlock Gorge” -- before I left that night and wished me luck.

“Of all the unsolved cases I’ve had in my time -- and there have been a couple -- that’s the one that’s caused me the most sleepless nights over the years.” He admitted as he walked me to my car. “Because if it could happen there, who’s to say it couldn’t happen somewhere else? Lots of small places where small numbers of people live now, after the Crisis, and we don’t even have official eyes on them all. Someday, it’s going to happen again.”

*

Daniel Locke was not the sort of person one would reasonably expect to find running a gang of ruthless outlaws out of a bloodsoaked canyon in the desert but, well, he did.

He was the scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family, a step below the true northeastern aristocratic clans of the day but rich enough from their own endeavors that their “lesser” social cachet hardly impeded them. His elder brother, Alexander, graduated from Harvard and served terms in both the Massachusetts State Senate and in the US House of Representatives. His younger sister, Margaret, graduated from Mount Holyoke and married well, repeatedly, further enhancing the family’s fortunes.

Daniel himself attended Dartmouth and evidently graduated with sufficient academic success that his doting parents sent him on a Grand Tour of Europe, a rite of passage beloved by the economic elite of the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. We know, as a result of his own extensive journals on the topic -- Locke loved to write, particularly about himself -- that his Tour departed from the well-beaten path of posing for portraiture among majestic Roman ruins in Italy rather early in the proceedings. His writings on the topic are erudite and scathing, lambasting the insipidity of it all, scrabbling for meaning amid the pretty wreckage instead of seeking the true legacy of lost knowledge, sparing not even his family, “who seemed to content to profit from the scholarly endeavors of earlier, better generations,” and I quote. At the point in the standard Grand Tour itinerary where the average wealthy American would winter in Geneva, writing odes to the lake and/or the Rhone, sipping chocolate and flirting with beautiful young women (apple-cheeked Swiss milkmaid variety), Daniel Locke abandoned his traveling companions and his guide and continued on. In the last of the journals he wrote in Switzerland, entrusted to a college friend for delivery to his parents, he indicated his intent to seek a hidden school in the mountains of the uttermost (European) East.

And then he vanished.

For more than ten years.

When next he appears in the historical record, it’s on a Wanted poster in the New Mexico Territory. A relatively modest reward is offered for his capture on charges related to a stagecoach robbery on the road between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. That would, over the next handful of years, change rather rapidly: at the time of his putative death, the bounty on his head was over $15000, one of the highest in the history of the Old West, and the charges had grown to include murder and rape as well as a spectacular and brazen series of robberies. His own initial successes as an outlaw attracted to him a band of likeminded confederates and together they terrorized communities on both sides of the New Mexico-Arizona territorial border.

They were called the Deadlock Gang: Daniel “Deadeye” Locke, who claimed that his uncanny skill with a gun was a gift from the hands of the Devil himself, for which he had given his mortal soul; Black Frank O’Rourke, an Irishman who fled New York just ahead of the hangman, having murdered both his wife and her lover; Jefferson “Skinner” Delacour, an infamous former Confederate officer and fugitive slave-hunter; Sarah “Red” Reed, a young woman from a long line of cattle rustlers, horse thieves, bootleggers, and fences. Others came went but they formed the core of the group and, for four bloody years in the late 1870s to the early 1880s, they held sway over a constantly shifting court of rogues and killers from the little town in the canyon that came to be known as Deadlock Gorge. In many ways, they owed their success to the possession of that stronghold: the entrances and exits of the Gorge were natural chokepoints, easy for a relatively small group of defenders to hold, and the twisting, switchback routes along the canyon floor and through the town itself lent a significant advantage to anyone familiar with their tricks. It couldn’t last, of course: each of the gang’s members were wanted individually for crimes ranging from murder to bank robbery to forgery and, together, they represented a significant threat to law and order as well as an almost impossibly huge payday for bounty hunters.

In the end, it was a joint operation of the US Marshals, a detachment of the regular Army, and a posse of personally interested individuals, many of them the friends and kin of the Deadlock Gang’s victims, to finally take them down. Light artillery pieces were involved. So were at least two gatling guns. There are still places along the rim of the canyon where the scars of the battle are visible to this day. By the time the shooting was over, more than half the Marshals, no small number of the soldiers, a goodly portion of the vengeful posse, and the entire Deadlock Gang lay dead. Or, at least, it was presumed that the entire Deadlock Gang was dead. Their bodies were recovered from the bullet-riddled ruins of the saloon/inn that they used as the site of their last stand, as were their personal possessions: an astonishing quantity of ill-gotten lucre, firearms, explosives, and Daniel Locke’s many, many, many journals, which he had never ceased to write and excerpts from which ultimately served to confirm his identity to his horrified family back East. All but one was buried in Fairview Cemetery in Albuquerque -- that one being Daniel Locke himself, whose body disappeared before it could be interred. The Locke family denied any involvement in the matter and, in fact, his name was formally stricken from the family lineage. They refused to take possession of any of his mortal effects, leaving his journals and his allegedly hell-forged six-gun to the authorities to dispose of as they wished. Packed away in an ironbound steamer trunk, they passed through numerous hands over the course of a century before finally landing in the possession of the University of New Mexico Sante Fe Historical Documents Archive where they were promptly deposited in the storage annex and forgotten again for nearly a second century.

They were rediscovered in the early 2050s when the Historical Document Archive began an aggressive program of content digitization for the preservation of at-risk documents. The revelation that the so-called “Deadlock Journals” still existed sent a shockwave through the loose community of historians focused on the Old West -- it was generally assumed that they had been destroyed at some point, surviving only in the occasional excerpt published by the more salacious tabloid newspapers of the day. It’s easy to understand why the discovery was such a sensation: college educated outlaws who can’t stop writing about everything they see, hear, do, and think are rare as hen’s teeth, and Daniel Locke continued to be a particularly witty, insightful, and erudite example of the breed right up to the end of his life. His authorial voice is distinct and precise, with a natural storyteller’s gift for phrase-turning and an artist’s eye for detail. In fact, several of the journals are enlivened with his pen-and-ink drawings and the occasional watercolor rendering of landscapes and his cohorts, as well as duplications of the petroglyph-bearing standing stones that once ringed Deadlock Gorge. A genuine polymath, he spoke and wrote in several languages, including his native English, Spanish, French, modern Italian, Latin, two southern Athabaskan dialects, and Romanian.

The “Romanian Memoirs” are by far the most interesting to me because it is in them, and them alone, that he discusses at any length the ten years he spent in Europe, if only obliquely in many cases. What one can surmise is that he did, indeed, find the school he sought and, after many trials, won entry to it, that he drank deep of the wells of secret knowledge and, contrary to his boasts to the contrary, he was one of the fortunates who left its walls with his soul no more in hock to unholy powers than the cost of his tuition. More importantly, they detail his motives for abandoning a life of wealth and ease among the Yankee upper crust for brutal outlawry on the frontier: something there reached out and called to him almost as soon as he landed at the port of New Orleans and he could no more deny its summons than he could refuse to drink water or breathe air. Something that lay waiting beneath the sands, chained deep within the blood-red stone, something that could not free itself but required willing hands to act as its protector and, eventually, its redeemer. Locke traveled west, across Texas, into the territory of New Mexico, where in the bloody, water-carved canyon that eventually bore a bastardized version of his name, he apparently found what he sought and willingly chose to become its servant, feeding it a bounty of fear and pain and blood. He knew, eventually, that it would have to end -- they were far too bold in their depredations, far too cruel in their savagery to be left to their tasks for very long -- and he evidently prepared for that eventuality. He left his “grimoire” and his tools encased somewhere in the webwork of sandstone caverns woven through the walls of the canyon for his “heirs” to find, a bequest that has, theoretically at least, remained unrecovered.

Daniel Locke, during his time in the west, fathered at least three natural children: his daughters Charity Needless (with Silver City prostitute Katherine Needless) and Amelia Reed (with Ruth Reed, the younger sister of his partner in crime, Sarah Reed) and an unnamed son who was only a few weeks old at the time of Locke’s death. A cursory examination of birth and death records show the descendants of his daughters are scattered all over the southwestern United States. The Reeds relocated to California in the bloody aftermath of the legitimate massacre in Deadlock Gorge. Katherine Needless died of tuberculosis in an asylum in the Arizona Territories -- her daughter became a Ward of the Court, eventually a schoolteacher, and married in due course. If any of them sought the inheritance their father left for them, it has not entered into any historical record that I can access.

*

The Ancient Ancestors -- at one time called the Anasazi and now known more widely as the Ancestral Puebloans -- left their marks all over the Four Corners region, quite literally, including in what would become known as Deadlock Gorge. At the extreme southern end of the canyon, high off the floor, lies the remains of a small cliff-dwelling, less complete and subsequently less studied than the far more extensive, and famous, examples to be found in Mesa Verde National Park and Chaco Canyon. At one point, I’m told, the entire canyon was ringed in petroglyph-bearing stones, enormous chunks of basalt carved from the El Malpais lava fields, carried overland by unknown means, and set in place around the rim of Deadlock Gorge in antiquity. Today, only a few examples remain -- but those that do are strikingly similar to those found on Urraca Mesa, famous in legend as the site of a world-shaking battle between the Lords of the Outer and Underworlds, a gateway into the realm of evil spirits hostile to humanity, and the place in New Mexico where lightning strikes more than any other. Compasses don’t like to work there and most technology decides you don’t really need to live in the 21st Century anyway.

Ranger Maritza Whitehawk reminds me of this as we sit together at her kitchen table, sipping coffee and reviewing the documents I’ve already compiled as part of my research, including the copy of Sergeant Flores’ casefile. Her family owns a trim little ranch outside Gallup: a two-story cabin, a barn for horses, an enclosure for goats, pasturage. A fire burns in the wood stove in the next room, perfuming the air with piñon and cedar, and the coffee she pours for me is considerably better than the boiled dirt I’ve been drinking for the last few days.

“I wasn’t involved in the initial investigation the night of the incident -- but in the days after? Oh, yes. As many hours as I could reasonably assign myself.” She admits, paging through the casefile thoughtfully. “Wild stuff going on all around the region that night and in the days leading up.”

“The 911 dispatcher I spoke to about the incident said as much.”

“Now there’s a job I’d never want to do.” She chuckles, but it’s the last laugh for a while. Seven months before the disappearance of the Center’s population, her own eldest son, Marcus Whitehawk, vanished in the hills southwest of Deadlock Gorge. Neither he nor any indication of his whereabouts were ever discovered, despite an intensive search. The loss has been one of the driving forces of her life since: she has compiled an amazingly complete and comprehensive dossier of missing persons (solved and unsolved), unexplained disappearances, and horrible, tragic deaths associated with Deadlock Gorge and environs within the last century.

It’s...a lot. The hardcopy for the last century alone is three solid feet thick. Fortunately, the digital version fits neatly on a microdrive, which she shares with me for mutual research purposes. It’s while combing through it while writing the outline of this article that I discovered it, tucked in among the details related to the October 29th incident at the Center.

[Begin Sidebar:

A grainy still photo lifted from the camera roll of a media drone with moderately competent imaging equipment: a hover-gurney ringed in EMTs and mobile life support equipment, carrying a single patient who seems to be unconscious and severely wounded, no more than teenaged despite his height.

[End Sidebar]

Jesse McCree. That was the name appended to the image file. There are several other pieces of documentation. A missing persons report, anonymously filed. An official Have You Seen This Child/at risk notification from the authorities in Gallup. A copy of his admission and treatment records from the University of New Mexico Hospital at Santa Fe, which is an impressive and dubiously legal bit of records request chicanery that I’m going to have to find out how she managed. Several more information requests, including her own request for a copy of his sealed testimony before a Federal circuit court judge, also denied.

Jesse Nathaniel McCree is an oddity. Publicly accessible records for him exist but not the sort of records you might expect. Adoption records, and there’s a birth certificate on file with the State of New Mexico, the information related to his biological parents either blank or redacted. He was apparently home schooled, except for one brief stint at public school in Gallup, via the Schools For Isolated and Distance Education, a special needs online education outfit that operates in several countries around the world, including the United States. They issued him diploma-equivalent educational certs on a nonstandard completion curve -- he missed a whole year and a half of school following whatever he experienced that night in Deadlock Gorge but still graduated at the highest levels of academic proficiency. He sat collegiate admission exams slightly later than average but came away with scores sufficient to earn a slot at the school of his choice: he chose the University of New Mexico, where he dual-majored in History and Anthropology with a concentration in Ethnology. Upon graduation, he pursued employment with the National Park Service and further education in the UNM Anthropology Masters program, specializing in folklore and cultural anthropology. (His Master’s thesis is available through the UNM bookstore in dead tree and ebook formats and makes for fascinating reading. I heartily recommend it.) He is pursuing his doctorate in those fields, occasionally guest lectures at UNM, and serves as the Ranger In Residence at the Los Cerrillos National Monument.

He has no social media presence to speak of and the primary means of contacting him seems to be through the NPS website’s links. I’ve used them. He turns up occasionally in tourist photos and on undergrad social media threads from UNM students that attend his lectures. I’m not entirely surprised: he is a strikingly good-looking man, tall and lean and, well, rangy, all dark hair and eyes and, listening to his drawl on recordings, I can see why he ties Freshman knickers in knots. At the same time, there’s something just a little bit off about him, something not quite right that might come across more clearly in recordings than it does in person. I can’t entirely put my finger on what it is.

He has, thus far, declined to grant an interview. If this changes, you will be the first to know. Until then, both he and Deadlock Gorge continue to guard their secrets.

-- Olivia Colomar, Paranormal New Mexico, reporting.

[bamby0304]

The Hart: Chapter One

Summary:  When Lizzie was just a few months old, she lost her father. Fifteen years later she lost her mother, and then her sister. Now in her early twenties Lizzie spends her days and nights hunting things and saving people. When the Winchesters meet the bright eyed and bubbly blonde they don’t realise what they’re in for… and neither does she…

Part Eight: Psychic?

Masterlist

Warnings: Violence and death

Bamby

EPOV

Sam is a psychic... Sam, is a psychic... How am I supposed to process this? How does this even happen? My head hurt. It had been hurting for a few hours, ever since Dean and I had walked into our hotel room and found Sam on the ground.

He hadn't even hesitated before telling us he'd had a vision.

I freaked out. Dean made sure Sam was okay. Sam told us what his vision was about. I kept freaking out. Sam tried to explain it to me. Dean got protective and warned me not to say a word or he'd kill me. I snapped back at him, while still freaking out.

Eventually we all calmed down and piled into the car though. I still wasn't sure if I wanted to tag along, but I'd gotten slightly attached to the guys, and I knew that I could trust them. Despite this new turn of events.

"Continue on OR-224 west." Sam's phone's GPS spoke.

"There are only two town in the U.S. named Rivergrove." Sam told Dean.

"How come you're so sure it's the one in Oregon?" Dean asked.

"There was a picture of Crater Lake."

"Okay, what else?"

Sam shrugged, explaining the vision for the millionth time. "I saw a dark room, some people and a guy tied to a chair."

"And I ventilated him?" Dean didn't sound too sure about that part, as if it wasn't like him. Which it wasn't. Dean didn't go about killing people randomly.

"Yeah. You thought there was something inside him."

"A demon? Was he possessed?"

"I don't know."

"Well, all your real visions are always tied to the Yellow-Eyed Demon somehow. Was there any black smoke? Did we try to exorcise him?"

"No, nothing. You just plugged him. That's it."

"I'm sure I had a good reason."

"I sure hope so."

"What does that mean?" Dean asked his brother. "I mean, I'm not gonna waste an innocent man. I wouldn't." he insisted.

"I never said you would."

"Fine." Dean nodded.

"Fine. Look, we don't know what it is, but whatever it is, that guy in the chair is part of it. Let's find him, see what's what."

"Fine." Dean repeated.

"Fine." Sam sighed before he turned around to look at me. "You okay, back there?"

I nodded frantically. "Peachy."

Usually I sat behind Sam or in the middle, but for the first time, I was behind Dean. As much as I trusted Sam, I was still a little unsure. My job was to kill things like him. That's what were instincts were telling me to do. But my heart was telling me not to. He was a friend after all.

"You're not scared, are you?" Dean sounded both unsure and amused.

We both knew that if I became a problem, he wouldn't hesitate to stop me. Dean and Sam would always come first when it came to each other. No one got in between the brothers.

I completely understood that. I knew what it was like to have a close bond with a sibling. I knew what it was like to have someone that close to you. Someone who was by your side for every second while growing up.

But Dean and I were friends as well, and the thought of losing him or Sam, because of something like this... I'd lost enough already.

DPOV

Sam nudged me as I parked the car. "He was there." he pointed out my window to an African American man sitting outside a bait shop.

"Okay." I nodded, getting out of the car before moving to open Liz's door. As she stepped out, I leaned closer to her. "Sam is not a monster. He's not like the things we hunt. He doesn't want this. So you being scared… well you don't have to be."

She looked over my shoulder at Sam as he got out of the car, before her eyes flicked back to mine. "Are you sure?"

"He's my brother. I know him better than I know myself."

Nodding slowly, she stepped away from the car so I could close the door. "I trust you, Dean. If you say he's good, then he's good. But the moment I think otherwise-"

I cut her off. "I won't let you hurt him."

"And I can't hurt him." she sighed. "I've been thinking about it in the car. You and Sam... you're my friends. Even if I wanted to. I could never hurt you guys." she shrugged. "So I'd just leave."

I never thought hearing those words would affect me the way they did. Liz had been with Sam and I for a little over a month now. We'd bonded and become good friends.

There was a friendship between her and Sam that I didn't quite understand. They shared something I couldn't share with either of them. But at the same time, she and I had a bond that she would never have with Sam.

She was the kind of person who could get along with everyone. She was fun, smart, kind, witty, sarcastic, funny, tough, and bold. She was one of the strongest people I knew emotionally and mentally. She was always ready to do whatever was necessary, no matter what the risks were. She could always put a smile on your face, but she could also be serious when she had to.

The idea of losing someone like her. I didn't think I could let that happen. Sam wasn't a danger. He never would be. She would see that. Then, she'd never have a reason to leave.

"Everything okay?" Sam asked from behind me.

"Yeah." I gave a short nod. "Let's do this."

We walked across the road and headed over to the man. He didn't look up as we stopped a few feet in front of him. He just kept fiddling with a fishing rod.

"Morning." I called to him.

He looked up then. "Morning. Can I help you?"

"Yeah. Ah, Billy Gibbons, Frank Beard, Gilligan Stillwater. U.S. Marshals." I nodded to Sam and Liz as I pulled out my fake badge, which they then did as well.

This got the man's attention. "What's this about?"

"We're looking for someone." I answered.

"A young man, early twenties. He'd have a thin scar right below his hairline." Sam described to the man.

"What'd he do?"

"Well, nothing. We're actually looking for someone else. But we think this young man can help us." Sam explained.

Liz nodded. "He's not in trouble, sir." she smiled.

"Well, not yet." I added. But the look the guy gave me made me think I'd said the wrong thing. My eyes landed on his arm, noticing a familiar tattoo sitting on his forearm. I used it to get him back on our side. "I think maybe you know who he is, master Sergeant." his face softened a little, so I shrugged and went on. "My dad was in the Corps. A corporal."

"What company?"

"Echo two-one."

"So can you help us?" Sam asked.

The guy thought it over for a moment before answering. "Duane Tanner's got a scar like that. But I know him. Good kid, keeps his nose clean."

"Oh, I'm sure he does." I nodded. "Do you know where he lives?"

"With his family, up Aspen Way."

"Thank you." Liz smiled again before she turned to Sam and me. "Well, let's go then."

The three of us left the man to get back to work before crossing the road again, looking around for any signs of anything unusual. But honestly, the place just looked like any other small town.

"Hey." Sam called.

Liz and I turned to see him gesturing to a wooden post with a word carved into it.

"'Croatoan'?" I asked.

"Yeah." Sam nodded, but I didn't get it. "Roanoke? Lost colony? Ring a bell? Dean, did you pay any attention in history class?"

"Yeah." I answered, though even I could hear how unsure I sounded. "The shot heard around the world, how bills become laws."

He shook his head at me. "That's not school. That's School House Rock!"

"Roanoke was one of the first English colonies to settle in America during the late 1500s. But when other settlers came to join them, having just come off more recent ships, they found everyone was gone. The only thing left was the word croatoan carved into a single tree."

I turned to Liz, shocked. "How do you know these things?"

"I've picked up a book or two in my life, Dean."

"Anyway." Sam got back to it. "There were theories. Indian raid. Disease. But nobody knows what really happened. They were all just gone. I mean, wiped out overnight."

I laughed lightly. "You don't really think that's what's going on here? I mean..." but his face told me everything I needed to know. He did believe it.

"Whatever I saw in my head, it sure wasn't good." he looked to the carved word again. "But what do you think could do that?"

"Well, I mean, like I said, all your weirdo visions and always tied to the Yellow-Eyed Demon somehow, so..."

"We should get help. Bobby, Ellen, maybe."

"Yeah, that's a good idea." I pulled out my phone, about to dial a number. But I couldn't. "I don't have a signal."

Sam and Liz pulled out their phones. But as they looked to the screens, it was clear they didn't either. This was not normal.

I spotted a public phone a few steps away from Sam. Walking past him, I headed over to it, giving it a try. But there was no point.

"Line's dead." I slammed the phone back into place. "I'll tell you one thing. If I was gonna massacre a town, that'd be my first step." I noted, suddenly not liking this place at all.

EPOV

Sam, Dean and I stepped up to the front door the Sergeant directed us to. Opening the screen door, Dean nodded to his brother who then knocked on the wooden one. A moment later, it opened, revealing a young man.

"Yeah?" he asked expectantly.

"Hi." I smiled, showing him my badge. "We're looking for a Duane Tanner. He wouldn't happen to live here, would he?"

The guy nodded. "He's my brother."

"Can we talk to him?" Dean asked.

"He's not here right now."

"You know where he is?"

"Yeah." the guy looked to each of us as he answered. "He went on a fishing trip up by Roslyn Lake."

Sam spoke up then. "Your parents home?"

"Yeah, they're inside."

"Jake, who is it?" a man called from inside the house before appearing in the door way as well.

"Hi. U.S. Marshals, sir. We're looking for your son, Duane." Dean explained

"Why? He's not in trouble, is he?"

"Of course not, sir. We just need to ask him a few routine questions, that's all." I turned my smile to him. "Do you know when he'll be back from his trip?"

"I'm not too sure."

"Well, maybe your wife knows." Sam suggested.

There was something fishy going on here. It hadn't taken me long to figure that out. The way they both stood in the door way, smiling like they were from the Brady Bunch or something. No one is ever that happy. Especially when three strangers are on their porch asking questions about a family member.

Mr Tanner shrugged. "You know, I don't know. She's not here right now."

"Well, your son said she was." Dean noted.

The son looked up then. "Did I?"

"She's getting groceries." Mr Tanner chuckled lightly. "So when Duane gets back, is there a number where he can get a hold of you?"

"Oh, no, we'll just check in with you later." Dean nodded.

"But thank you for all your help." I smiled at them. "You two have a lovely day."

"And you as well." Mr Tanner smiled back at me before he and his son headed back into the house.

Sam, Dean and I turned to leave, walking down the porch steps. We waited until the door was closed before we spoke up.

"Anyone else getting creepy vibes from them?" I asked.

"Yeah." Dean agreed. "Little too Stepford."

Sam nodded. "Bigtime."

"Well, then. Looks like we're not leaving just yet." I turned form the brothers and headed for the side of the house, knowing they'd be right behind me.

We ducked under windows, peeking through to see if we could see anything going on inside. It wasn't until we were at the back of the house, by a window to the kitchen, when we stopped.

Tied and gagged to a chair was a woman I could only assume was Mrs. Tanner. Standing by was Mr Tanner as he cut into his son's arm with a kitchen knife. That was the moment we pulled out our guns.

Dean moved back, stepping to the door before he kicked it down. The three of us hurried in, guns raised.

Mr Tanner ran at us, knife in hand, yelling at the top of his lungs.

"Put it down!" Sam warned.

Dean didn't hesitate before he pulled the trigger, and kept going until Mr Tanner was on the ground. The son ran past and out the window before Sam or I had a chance to get him.

Sam ran after him, moving to stand by the window and aim his gun at the kid. Yet he didn't shoot. I couldn't see, so I didn't know if he'd had a chance or not. But then again, maybe he did. Maybe he just didn't take the shot.

I was starting to think Sam really wasn't a danger.

DPOV

Sam helped Mrs. Tanner out of the car, while Liz and I headed for the trunk where we'd stashed Mr Tanner's body. The son was gone, but I had a feeling he wouldn't be gone for long. Whatever was going on, was only getting started.

"Wait." Liz move to stand in my way of the trunk. "Show me your hands."

"What? We don't have time for this, Liz."

"Just do it, Winchester." she snapped, grabbing my hands before taking a look at them. As she continued to talk I found my focus divided between her voice, and her gentle hands against my rough ones. "I'm working on a theory. Mr Tanner cut the son, who didn't fight back. There might be something in their blood, and the last thing we need is for it to get in your system."

I looked down at her confused and amazed. "Who are you?"

A small smile played on her lips as she reached up to check my neck as well. "Just a girl, Dean. I'm just a girl."

But she wasn't just a girl. She was more than that, and it left me curious.

"Okay, you're clean." she nodded, taking a step back as she gestured to the body. "Carry on."

Not needing to be told twice, I reached into the trunk and pulled the wrapped body over my shoulders as Liz kept watch. Once it was secure and I was sure it wouldn't fall, we headed into the building where Sam and Mr Tanner disappeared to. The doctor's.

Liz held the door open for me. Once I stepped inside she walked ahead and into the waiting room. "Hello?" she called.

A middle aged, blonde woman came around the corner, her eyes landing on me right away. "Is that-"

"Mr Tanner?" I shifted the weight of the body, causing a hand to fall out from underneath the blanket. "Yeah."

"Was he attacked too?"

"Uh..." my eyes flicked to Liz as I decided to tell the truth. "No, actually, he did the attacking and then he got himself shot."

"Shot?" the woman's eyes went wide.

"Yeah." Liz nodded.

"And who are you two?"

"U.S. Marshals." Liz pulled out her badge. "Do you have somewhere my partner can put the body?"

"Yes. Uh, bring him back here." the woman nodded. "I'm Dr Lee, by the way." she introduced herself as she led us further into the building.

"Dean and Elizabeth." I didn't have time for fake names and the usual bullshit. Right now, there were more pressing issues we had to deal with.

EPOV

Sam, Dean and I stood by the door as we watched Dr Lee work on patching up Mrs. Tanner. We didn't say anything as we all listened to Mrs. Tanner tell us what happened. Dean, Sam and I knew better than to speak.

We didn't even know what was going on. It's not like we could actually offer much help at this point.

"Wait, you said Jake helped him?" Dr Lee asked Mrs. Tanner. "Your son Jake?"

Mrs. Tanner nodded. "They beat me. Tied me up." she cried.

"I don't believe it." the doctor's assistant spoke from the corner.

"Pam." Dr Lee shook her head at her, then turned back to Mrs. Tanner. "Beverly, you've any idea why they would act this way? Any history of chemical dependency?"

"No, of course not. I don't know why. One minute, they were my husband and my son... And then the next, they had the devil in them."

Dean turned to Sam and me. "We gotta talk." he told us before walking out of the room.

Sam and I were right behind him, moving to the waiting room while the others stayed where they were.

"Those guys were whacked out of their gourds." Dean noted as he came to a stop and turned to us again.

"What so you think? Multiple demons, mass possession?" Sam suggested.

Dean shrugged. "If it is a possession, there could be more. God knows how many. It could be like a frigging Shriner convention." he nodded at me. "You seen anything like this?"

"No." I shook my head. "I mean, the closest I've come to seeing something like this, is when dealing with demons. But there was no smoke when Mr Tanner died. No signs of possession other than the craziness."

"Well, that's one way to take out a town." Dean noted. "Take it from the inside. Something must have turned them into monsters." he looked to Sam. "You know, if you'd taken out the other one, there'd be one less to worry about."

I stepped back then. This was not something I was getting into.

"I'm sorry, all right?" Sam told him. "I hesitated, Dean. It was a kid."

"No, it was an it. Not the best time for a bleeding heart, Sam."

The sound of heels on the ground had us all turn to see Dr Lee walk into the room and towards us.

I stepped up to her, speaking before one of the guys could. "How is she?"

"Terrible." she answered honestly. "What the hell happened?"

There was no other answer I could give her other than the truth. "We're not sure."

"Yeah, well, you just killed my next-door neighbour."

"We didn't have a choice." Dean insisted, standing closer to me, a defensive and protective tone in his voice.

"Maybe so, but we need the county sheriff. I need the coroner."

"Phones are down." Sam noted.

She sighed. "I know, I tried. Tell me you got a police radio in the car."

"We do. But it crapped out just like everything else." Sam was right, we'd tried it on the way here.

The doctor looked to the ground, shaking her head. "I don't understand what is happening."

"How far is it to the next town?" Dean asked her.

"It about forty miles down to Sidewinder."

"All right. I'm gonna go there and see if I can find some help. My partners will stick around, keep you guys safe."

But instead of agreeing, I turned to Dean. "I'm going with you."

He looked from me, to the doctor and then back to me. "Can I talk to you in private for a minute?" he asked. But before I could answer, he grabbed my arm and walked us away from the others so we could talk without being heard. "This better not be about Sam."

"No. It's about you." I pulled my arm from him as we stopped. "We don't know what's out there. I'm not letting you go off alone. Everyone needs back up right now."

He searched my eyes, frowning as if he wasn't sure if he should listen to me or not. But we both knew I would end up doing what I wanted anyway. There was no point in fighting it.

"Fine, okay." sighing, he gave a short nod. "Sam, we'll be back." he called before we headed for the exit and walked out into the street.

I could feel a thickness in the air the moment we were out in the open. Whatever was changing, had already begun.

DPOV

I stopped the car behind an abandoned car on the side of the road. From where we were parked, we could see blood on the back window of the car in front of us.

"Stay in the car."

"Hell no." Liz pulled out her gun from the back of her pants.

Shaking my head, not bothering to argue, I stepped out of the car and headed for the trunk while she slid over and got out through my door as well, watching out surroundings. I grabbed a shotgun and closed the trunk before moving to stand with her again.

The two of us moved carefully and cautiously.

A baby seat sat in the back, soaked in blood. The front seats were covered in blood as well. The front window had been shot at. Both the driver's and passenger's window had been smashed in. But there were no people.

My eyes fell to the ground where a bloody knife lay.

"Dean..." Liz looked into the car at the baby seat. "You don't think..."

I stepped closer to her, pressing my hand to her back as I turned us to the Impala. "You stay close to me, okay? No matter what."

All she did was nod as we got back into the car and drove off.

SPOV

I was with the doctor as she checked out a sample of Mr Tanner's blood under a microscope. Her assistant was keeping an eye on Mrs. Tanner, trying to keep the woman calm as we waited for Dean and Lizzie to get back.

"Huh..."

I turned to Dr Lee. "What?"

"His lymphocyte percentage is pretty high. His body was fighting off a viral infection."

"Really?" What kind of virus?"

"Can't say for sure."

"Do you think an infection could've made him act like that?"

"None that I've ever heard of. I mean, some can cause dementia, but not that kind of violence. And besides, I've never heard of one that did this to the blood."

That didn't sound promising... "Did what?"

"There's this weird residue. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it was sulphur."

Yeah, that is definitely not good.

EPOV

Dean rounded the corner, coming up to a bridge. But he had to stop. Blocking the road were several vehicles, and armed men. None of them moved. They didn't do anything actually. They just stood there, watching us.

At the front of the group was Jake Tanner, grinning at us smugly.

I shook my head. "This is not good..."

A loud bang made me jump as a man hit the roof of the Impala before he leaned down by Dean's door, looking in though the open window at us.

Dean chuckled lightly. "Hey."

"Sorry, road's closed." the man told us, voice flat and emotionless.

"Yeah, I can see that." Dean nodded. "What's up?"

"Quarantine."

"Quarantine?" Dean asked. "What is it?"

The man shrugged. "Don't know. Something going around out there."

"Uh-huh. Who told you that?"

"County sheriff."

"Is he here?"

"No. He called." there was a smugness about the man. As if he knew we knew the truth, but none of us were willing to bite first. "Say, why don't you get out of the car and we'll talk a little?" he asked.

Just then, another man appeared by my window.

I tensed and moved a little closer to Dean, who chuckled at the man by his window. "Oh, you're a couple of handsome devils, but I don't swing that way, and she's taken." he wrapped his arm around my shoulders then. "Sorry." he shrugged.

The man by Dean smiled. "I'd sure appreciate it if you got out of the car, just for a quick minute."

"Yeah, I bet you would." Dean's arm moved from behind me as he shifted in his seat a little.

Suddenly he reached for the gear stick and put the car in reverse. But as the Impala moved, the two men reached in and grabbed us. I was smaller and weaker than the man holding me, so before long, he almost had me out of the window.

Dean spun the car around, which caused both guys to lose their grip and let us go. I grabbed onto whatever I could and pulled myself back before the force could take me out of the car with the men. As they dropped to the ground the people at the bridge started shooting at us, but we were gone before any bullets did any damage.

"You okay?" Dean asked, looking from the road to me and then back, a panic in his voice.

"Yeah... I guess." I nodded, out of breath. I was shaking, slightly in shock. "I hope."

"Hey. Hey, Liz." he wrapped an arm around me, causing me to turn and look up at him. "We're gonna be okay. You hear me? We're gonna get out of this." he assured me as he continued to drive.

Nodding, I slid closer to him, still shaking as I wondered if he really believed what he was saying, or if he was just trying to make me feel better...

SPOV

"I don't understand." Mrs. Tanner shook her head. "Are you saying my husband and Jake had a disease?"

"That's what we're trying to find out." Dr Lee nodded. "Now, during the attack, do you remember, did you have any direct contact with their blood?"

"Oh, my God. You don't think I've got this virus, do you?"

Dr Lee sighed. "Beverly, I don't know what to think. But with your permission, we'll take a blood sample."

Mrs. Tanner thought it over for a moment, before nodding. She reached over and rested a hand on the doctor's as if she were agreeing.

Before anyone realized what was happening, Mrs. Tanner grabbed a hold of Dr Lee's wrist and yelled out as she backed handed her with her free hand. She then turned to me as I run for her. With a strong push, she practically threw me across the room and into a cabinet.

She grabbed a scalpel next, and started to run towards me, yelling once more.

I acted quickly, picking up a bottle of some kind of gas or something, which I then hit her across the head with. She fell to the ground, knocked out.

DPOV

I kept looking from the road, to Liz. I was worried. About her and Sammy. About the town. About myself. About everything. I'd never seen anything like this before, and it was freaking me out. How could a whole town go violently insane like this?

Liz tensed next to me. "Dean, look out!"

I turned back to the road. Standing in front of the car, rifle raised at us, was the Sergeant from earlier.

Hitting the brakes, I stopped right before I would have hit him.

"Hands where I can see them!" he ordered.

"Son of a-" This cannot be happening.

"Get out of the car!"

In the corner of my eye I could see Liz's grip on her gun tightening. "Dean..."

"Stay in the car." I told her and this time it wasn't negotiable. Doing as the Sergeant said, I started to get out of the car, my hands raised. "All right, easy there, big guy."

"Her too." he nodded to Liz.

While he was looking at her, I quickly pulled out my own gun and aimed it at him. "Put it down! Down!" I yelled.

"Lower it now!" he warned. "Are you two like them?"

"No, you?"

"No."

"You could be lying."

"So could you."

"Shut up!" Liz snapped, causing both me and the Sergeant to turn to her. "All you two are doing is drawing those bastards here. So shut up, and get in the car or get the hell out of here."

"She's right." I nodded- though kept my gun raised. "We could do this all day. Let's just take it easy before we kill each other."

He didn't move at first, but eventually he relaxed a little. "What's going on with everybody?"

"We don't know." I answered honestly.

The Sergeant shook his head. "My neighbour, Mr Rogers-"

"You got a neighbour named Mr Rogers?"

"Not anymore." he shook his head again. "He came at me with a hatchet. I put him down. He's not the only one. It's happening to everyone."

"I'm heading to doc's place. There's still some people left."

"No way. I'm getting out."

"There is no way out. They got the bridge covered. Now come on."

"I don't believe you."

"Fine, stay here." I shrugged as I started to get back in the car. "Be my guest."

The moment I closed the door, he lowered his rifle and pulled out a handgun as he started for the passenger side door.

"Liz, move closer to me." I told her as I pulled her closer. "You watch him. Keep your gun aimed at him. The moment he does something you don't like, you shoot him and you don't stop until he's dead. You got it?" I murmured in her ear as she leaned against me, turning slightly so she could do as I said.

"Got it." she nodded.

The Sergeant got in the car then, facing us as much as he could, his gun pointing in our direction. Liz stayed where she was, keeping her eyes on him just like I'd told her to.

"Well, this ought to be a relaxing drive." I muttered before driving off.

Bamby

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Mike Pence & John Bolton: Cold War Conservatism Clings to the White House The Trump presidency represented a solid break with the longstanding norms of right-wing politics in the USA. Trump campaigns as a foul-mouthed populist who criticized military interventions and seemed champion “the little guy” hurt by trade deals and Washington mismanagement. However, within the White House, Mike Pence and John Bolton seem to represent two dual trends that dominated American conservative politics from the 1970s onward. A Neoconservative National Security Advisor, and an Evangelical Vice President, seem to be working hard to preserve the Cold War formula for Republican leadership. John Bolton: The Heir of Strauss & Kristol A lot has been written about ‘Neoconservatism.’ But what does the term actually mean? Libertarians and paleoconservative analysts tend to use the term as a pejorative for mainstream Republicans who operate against their principles. The New York Times seems to portray “neocons” as a mysterious faction of interventionists that has infiltrated the government, pushing for larger foreign entanglements. In reality, Neoconservatism was the Republican Party getting slick, and marketing itself to a generation of Americans raised on television and rock music. It also involved honestly accepting elitism, something previous conservative trends had shunned. According to the New York Times, Irving Kristol was “commonly known as the godfather of neoconservatism.” Irving Kristol was a Trotskyite Communist in the 1930s who gradually shifted away from Marxism. According to his New York Times obituary, it was contact with actual working class people in the US military that convinced him to drop socialism altogether: “Drafted into the Army with a number of Midwesterners who were street-tough and often anti-Semitic, he found himself shedding his youthful radical optimism. “I can’t build socialism with these people,” he concluded. “They’ll probably take it over and make a racket out of it.” In his opinion, his fellow GI’s were inclined to loot, rape and murder, and only Army discipline held them in check. It was a perception about human nature that would stay with him for the rest of his life, creating a tension with his alternative view that ordinary people were to be trusted more than intellectuals to do the right thing.” After working with the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom program, Kristol eventually moved from liberal intelligence circles to the think tanks aligned with the Republican Party. The other individual credited with giving birth to Neoconservative thinking is Leo Strauss, the Plato Scholar who taught philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the University of Chicago. According to the Brooklyn Rail: “Strauss’s acolytes have penetrated American government and higher education, and have proudly influenced the nation’s social and public policies. In the Bush Administration itself there are numerous people who have been either taught by Strauss or who are disciples of his ideas—most notably Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Abram Shulsky, Director of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans; and there are those outside of government with great influence.” Leo Strauss, like Kristol, seemed to believe ordinary people needed to be duped and manipulated by a superior group of intellectuals. Describing Strauss’ worldview, The Nation wrote: “Intellectuals, he believed, would have to spread an ideology of good and evil, whether they believed it or not, so that the American people could be mobilized against the enemies of freedom. For this reason Strauss, we learn in one of many telling asides, was a huge fan of the TV series Gunsmoke and its Manichean depiction of good and evil.” Neoconservatism’s birth is traced back to Richard Nixon’s 1968 Presidential campaign, where Nixon appeared to have learned from George Wallace that sticking up for “ordinary folks” who were put off by the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Protests was a good strategy. Nixon’s rhetoric about the “silent majority” and “law and order” won him the Presidency. The Presidency of Ronald Reagan seemed to be Strauss’ dream come true. Reagan was a former cowboy actor, and when he described US foreign policy in oval office addresses, he sounded like a Sheriff on an episode of Gunsmoke. The wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Libya, Grenada, and Lebanon were simply a battle between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” with the complex realities hidden from the public mind. John Bolton is widely described as a Neoconservative, and he now holds the post to which Trump originally appointed Michael Flynn. Bolton seems to fancy himself as an expert on who the latest “bad guys” of the CNN narrative are, and why the USA should not hesitate to “spread freedom” by overthrowing them. His bombastic tone, including threats to send Nicolas Maduro to Guantanamo Bay, fit the neoconservative playbook. But these days, the non-interventionist sentiments once espoused by a minority of Ron Paul-types seem to be popular among the Red State base. And just as Neoconservatism is on the decline, a trend that the neocons depended on to exercise their political power, is also losing strength. A New Brand of Religious Fanaticism In 1957, British psychologist William Sargant wrote: “Various types of belief can be implanted in many people, after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common is temporarily impaired judgement and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of ‘herd instinct,’ and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility.” Sargant’s book The Mind Possessed digs into the nature of propaganda and mind control, specifically exploring aspect of it in religious ceremonies. Sargant’s research was conducted in coordination with the Tavistock Institute, as British intelligence worked to understand the nature of persuasion in the aftermath of the Second World War. The religious movement commonly called Evangelical Christianity is very much the result of efforts to cultivate and refine the phenomena that Sargant’s work described, and utilize the emotional aspects of religion to control and manipulate people. Distinct religious movements and communities have always existed throughout US history. Because the USA originated as a settler colony to which European cults and sects fled, the United States has a much higher tolerance of religious fanaticism. In two US states it is legal, for example, for churches to engage in snake-handling. This is an often deadly Christian ritual in which adherents take turns holding venomous snakes in a group setting, believing that God will protect them from being bitten. Fundamentalist and charismatic Christianity emerged as movements among American protestants in the 1800s. Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Pentecostalism, and other sects with very unique beliefs emerged as well. However, the religious current of Evangelical Christianity that gained a very large amount of political power during the 1980s and 90s, is a distinct trend, separate from other episodes of fanaticism in American history. While it drew from these previous, uniquely American movements and belief systems, it arose due to unique historical circumstances in the 1970s, paralleling and aligning with neoconservatism in the Republican Party. The first incarnations of what became Evangelical Christianity appeared in the late 1960s among the hippie counter-culture. Among drug using, rock music listening, anti-war protesting youth, a tendency emerged known as Jesus Freaks or Jesus People. This was a combination of hippie aesthetics with Christian teachings. Two broadway musicals Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, both of which became Hollywood movies, seemed to follow this trend of merging cultural hippy-ism with the narrative of the Bible’s New Testament. Early Jesus Freaks followed the path of leftist Christian Dorothy Day and joined the Catholic Church, despite questioning many of its teachings. The hymn They’ll Know We Are Christian By Our Love was first sung by counter-culture elements the embedded themselves in Catholic Congregations. Record company exec Tony Alamo, who had been largely involved in marketing the Beatles, quit the music business and launched his own church in Los Angeles utilizing the religious/aesthetic combination pioneer by the Jesus Freaks. These counter-culture Christians differed from other religious upsurges in American history because they had a consistent lack of interest in theology. While this was, to some degree, a gesture of rebellion against the “up tight” authoritarianism of existing Christian denominations, it was also an expression of anti-intellectualism. Historical facts, theological arguments, and knowledge of scripture did not matter. To the Jesus Freaks, religion was about the emotions they felt as they prayed, sang, and clapped in unison with other believers. It was about the glow they felt from engaging in acts of kindness, and the emotional relief provided by praying for forgiveness. Throughout US history, Fundamental Baptists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Mormons, and the various Charismatics took their history and unique interpretation of the Bible very seriously. Adherents of these movements can cite chapter and verse and argue harshly against rival interpretations. However, the Jesus Freaks were known for statements like “None of that matters, man, it’s just about love” and “I just believe the Bible.” Rather than pushing a specific doctrine, the Jesus People focused on a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” From Jesus Freaks to Mega-Churches Richard Nixon’s spiritual advisor Reverend Billy Graham, who supported the Vietnam War and opposed the Civil Rights Movement, was not a hippie by any stretch. But starting in 1969, Graham embraced the Jesus Freaks and had TV specials featuring long-haired, guitar playing youthful Christians. In 1972, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who had founded the Unification Church in South Korea, relocated to the United States. Reverend Moon was a skilled orator and a fanatical anticommunist. He had a very close relationship with Japanese and South Korean intelligence agencies, as was later revealed in testimony before the US congress. Nixon brought him to the United States where he also jumped on the Jesus Freakaesthetic, recruiting teenaged runaways and others to what was often presented as his “Peace Movement.” Like Graham, Moon was also a supporter of Nixon. Moon’s followers staged a hunger strike during the Watergate investigations, claiming they were a Communist plot to divide the United States. Reverends Moon, Alamo, and Graham all experimented with what started to become a very effective political-religious formula by the end of the 1970s. It was Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose organization called the Moral Majority, that became the vanguard of what eventually became known as Evangelical Christianity or The Religious Right. Instead of specific interpretations of Christianity, Non-Denominational churches sprung up across the country. These Mega-Churches as they were called, involved pastors who preached in front of big movie screens that showed images of what they were speaking about. They involved praise-bands that played Rock and Roll Music with Christian lyrics. While the Jesus People had opposed the Vietnam War and supported the Civil Rights Movement, the Evangelicals that emerged to dominate US politics were right-wing in every way. They aligned with the Neoconservative movement, and repeated its talking points. They believed that somehow the USA was divinely selected to rid the world of Communism, and eventually of Islamic Terrorism. The Evangelical Christian movement eventually became very well embedded in the US military, with the West Point military academy becoming a stronghold of evangelicalism. The “know-nothing” anti-intellectualism and lack of depth that defined the Jesus People, along with the hippie aesthetics, survived their movements transition to the right-wing of US politics. While Fundamentalist Baptists generally opposed rock music and men having long hair, and the Evangelical Mega-Churches embraced such things. While fundamentalist preachers like Billy Sunday or Charles G. Finney had certainly worked hard to stimulate emotional conversions with powerful oratory, the Evangelicals used flashing lights, rock music, and movie screens to turn the emotional volume up to a maximum level, while watering the theology down to almost nothing. “I believe only the Bible” Evangelicals were trained to say, “If it is not in the book, then I don’t need it.” A popular bumper sticker says “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” The long-standing theological wrangling found in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, John Calvin, and Martin Luther is long forgotten. Faith is about explosive feelings of fervor and sobs of redemption, not to be interrupted logical debate or moral reasoning. Mike Pence, who began his career as a radio host in Indiana before being elected governor, is very much an Evangelical Christian. He makes a point of publicly praying and attending evangelical gatherings. Like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson did before him, Pence is keenly interested in foreign policy and seems to take his cues from his neoconservative contemporaries, such as John Bolton. How Much Longer for the Neocon-Evangelical Block? The strength of neoconservatives in US politics has largely depended on a mass movement of evangelicals to back them up. As political leaders present a foreign policy narrative that sounds like a Hollywood movie, voters endorse it and soldiers carry it out, hyped up by a very simplistic and emotional reinterpretation of the Christian gospels. However, since the Presidency of George W. Bush, the Neocon-Evangelical block among Republicans has gotten significantly weaker. Both formulations are politicized smoke and mirrors, asking their adherents to just sit back and enjoy the show. Don’t do your own research. Don’t think too deeply. Let us entertain you and pluck your emotions with flashing lights. Listen to our surface level story about super-heroes battling super-villains. The 2008 financial meltdown made it hard for Americans to simply accept a narrative. Many wanted answers about why their homes had been foreclosed, why their wages were dropping, and why they were drowning in debt. Furthermore, the accessibility of information created by social media, allowed the religious skepticism of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris to enter every evangelical household with a doubting teenager. Trump won the Republican Nomination and the eventually 2016 election because he was explicitly not an Evangelical or a Neocon. However, Mike Pence and John Bolton seem to represent this longstanding formula for conservative policy-making, holding on to power within the Trump White House. It is doubtful that this political block, formed during the Cold War, will rebound. Populism, not authoritarian elitist manipulations, seems to be rising trend among the American right-wing.

[animalistauntamedblog]

There is little doubt that the dingo is the most reviled of all Australian mammals 

Aussies, as we all know, have a multitude of colourful expressions, some printable and others less so. But if someone calls you a dingo, there can be no doubt – your reputation is shot. ‘Dingo’ is “a term of extreme contempt… because of the animal’s reputation for cowardice and treachery.” The poor dingo has always had a terrible press.

How did the unfortunate dingo come by such notoriety?

Right from the time British settlers first brought sheep to Australia in the 18th century, the carnivorous dingo has been considered No. 1 pest by ranchers, a pest best met with a shotgun. Bounty hunters were hired to track and kill them. The bounty hunter in colonial writings of the 19th century was cast in the role of the quintessential Australian, canny and heroic, ridding the land of the thieving marauding dingo that was “ripping the heart out of sheep grazing country.” In these tales, dingoes were the outlaws and criminals.

“280,000 bounties were paid for dingoes between 1883 and 1930, by which time dingoes had become scarce in all but the north-eastern corner of the State [New South Wales], where sheep numbers were lowest” – a grievous slaughter, practically an annihilation.

As recently as 2011, an Aussie MP was still proposing a bounty be put on the animal’s head.

The villainous persona the unfortunate dingo has acquired is deeply imbedded in Australian culture. As a former dingo trapper Sid Wright says in his 1968 book ‘The Way of the Dingo’: “In the outback it is accepted without question that the dingo is a slinking, cowardly animal” 

“There is little doubt that the dingo is the most reviled of all Australian mammals. It is the only native mammal not protected in NSW by the State’s fauna legislation. [Indeed] the dingo, along with other wild dogs, is covered by a Pest Animal Control Order.”

The longest fence in the world

In the 1940s, the gaggle of higgledy piggledy fences erected to keep dingoes (and rabbits) out of sheep-grazed land was joined up to make one giant fence stretching 8614 km. Since shortened to 5614 km, it encloses the south east quarter of Australia, of which New South Wales is the heart. It’s the longest fence in the world, and its upkeep costs 10 million Australian dollars a year – “a truly epic testament to how much Australians can hate the dingo.”

Dingo fence Sturt National Park (Wikimedia Commons)

(Eat your heart out Donald Trump – if your horrible wall happens, as all lovers of wildlife, biodiversity and commonsense sincerely hope it won’t, it would be little more than half the size of this one.)

So, a loathed and despised predatory pest – such is the view of the dingo from the rancher’s side of the fence.

From the dingo’s side of the fence the picture looks very different

Dingoes ranged the bush thousands of years before the first sheep set foot on Australian soil, and while some co-existed with the indigenous peoples, none were ever domesticated. Quick-witted, pragmatic, and resourceful, these are wild animals perfectly adapted to their environment. According to a study undertaken at the Dingo Discovery Sanctuary and Research Centre near Melbourne, the dingo is, “the most intelligent animal in Australia apart from man.”

Sid Wright’s personal opinion of the dingo did not accord with what he knew to be the ranchers’ view. For him the animal was a “wild, magnificent creature” that should be conserved in Australia’s national parks and reserves.

These two opposing stances represent Australia’s ‘dingo schizophrenia’

So what to do about the dingo? Is it villain or hero? Should it be killed to protect sheep, or should it be protected as native fauna? This is the dilemma legislators and conservationists have to grapple with, of which the four most important elements are these:

1. Is the dingo a distinct species of its own, or is it simply a feral dog?

2. If it is a distinct species, is it a genuine native one, and why does this matter?

3. If it is a distinct and native species, is it threatened?

4. As the apex predator in Australia, what is the value of the ‘ecosystem services’ it provides?

Answer to Q.1

The dingo is indeed a dingo not a dog. It is a distinct species, as distinct and different from a domestic dog as the wolf is.

According to Dr. Laura Wilson, UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, “Pure dingoes have been shown to have cranial growth patterns more similar to wolves than domesticated dogs, larger brains and a more discrete breeding season producing fewer pups than domestic dogs.

“Dingoes are also notably less sociable with humans than domesticated dogs, characterised by a weaker ability to interpret gestures and a shorter time maintaining eye contact.”

The most recent research into the animal found further evidence of specific characteristics that differentiate dingoes from domestic dogs, feral dogs, and other wild canids such as wolves. And were there still any doubt, the clincher is of course the genetic data.

Answer to Q.2

“Dingoes have been living wild and independently of humans for a very long time — they have a distinct and unique evolutionary past that diverged some 5 to 10 thousand years ago from other canids. This is more than enough time for the dingo to have evolved into a naturalised predator now integral to maintaining the health of many Australian ecosystems.” – The dingo is a true-blue native species.

Co-author of a new study, Professor Corey Bradshaw agrees:“We show that dingoes have survived in Australia for thousands of years, subject to the rigours of natural selection, thriving in all terrestrial habitats, and largely in the absence of human intervention or aid.”

“The dingo is without doubt a native Australian species,” the Prof concludes.

Why does it matter?

It matters because conservationists’ ability to protect the dingo hinges entirely on establishing and upholding its status as a distinct and genuinely native Australian species.

It matters because the Western Australian government for example, in order to evade its conservation obligations to the dingo, recently made a politically-motivated and controversial attempt to classify it as “non-native fauna”.

Bizarrely – though maybe it’s not so bizarre considering New South Wales’ land area falls almost in its entirety on ‘the ranch side’ of the Dingo Fence, and is therefore no doubt under constant pressure from the ranching lobby – NSW is trying its darnedest to square the circle. It simultaneously acknowledges the dingo as a native species and excludes it from the protection afforded by the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016 to all the rest of its native fauna. “All native birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals (except the dingo) are protected in NSW. It is an offence to harm, kill or remove native animals unless you hold a licence.” But not if you’re harming, killing or removing dingoes. That’s ok. And dingoes continue to be routinely shot and poisoned in huge numbers.

It matters because Australia holds an unenviable record: “Half the world’s mammal extinctions over the last two hundred years have occurred in Australia, and we are on track for an acceleration of that loss” – Dr Thomas Newsome, School of Biological Sciences University of Sydney. “Predation by feral cats and foxes is the main reason that Australia has the worst mammal extinction record of modern time” – Prof. Sarah Legge, Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

Answer to Q.3

It matters because the dingo is on the IUCN’s Red List as a “vulnerable species”, and could also be heading for extinction.

Islands

Even without finding itself in the ranchers’ crosshairs, the dingo may lope down another disquieting path to extinction: interbreeding with domestic dogs settlers brought with them to Australia. Unless positive steps are taken to segregate the dingo, its genes will be diluted until the true species ceases to exist.

As with all other antipodean native fauna, the simplest way to conserve them is on an island. On islands it’s easier to control who or what arrives and who or what leaves. World Heritage site Fraser Island is “home to the most pure strain of dingoes remaining in eastern Australia.” Fraser Island boasts a wealth of native wildlife and operates an eco-code for visitors.

Dingoes on the beaches of Fraser Island

Yet even here dingoes live under a cloud of controversy. “110 dingoes have been humanely euthanised for unacceptable or dangerous behaviour on Fraser Island between January 2001 and September 2013, with between 1 and 32 dingoes killed in any given year.”

In 2011, one Jennifer Parkhurst was fined and given a suspended sentence for feeding the dingoes on the island, which she claimed were starving. Others supported her claim: “If things go on the way they’re going, the whole dingo population on that Fraser Island will become extinct,” said veterinarian Dr Ian Gunn, from Monash University’s National Dingo Recovery and Preservation Program. Yet other sources claim many of the dingoes on the island are overweight, verging on the obese!

And as you can imagine, the news media are ever ready to fall into a feeding frenzy and stoke dingo controversy whenever there’s a dingo attack on people. Wiki lists 10 such on the island since 1980, the worst in 2001 resulting in the tragic death of 9 year old Clinton Gage.

31 Fraser Island dingoes were culled in response. “It was a meaningless cull, but in terms of the genetics, it was terribly significant because it was a high proportion of the population” – Dr Ernest Healy, of Australia’s National Dingo Preservation and Recovery Program. Such a drastic cull diminished the gene pool, and just where the animals should live free from the dangers surrounding their mainland cousins, this raised the spectre of extinction for the pure breed dingo of the island. “Kingaroy dingo handler and breeder Simon Stretton says purebred Fraser Island dingoes will be gone in 10 years.”

Answer to Q.4

Besides sheep and cattle, invasive species camels, horses, donkeys, deer, rabbits, goats, hares, foxes, cats, rats and house mice also arrived in Australia courtesy of 19th and 20th century settlers. (Foxes were introduced in 1855 simply so the new human arrivals need not forgo the ‘sport’ of hunting them they enjoyed so much at home. The foxes have since multiplied to more than 7 million, and the threat level they pose to native fauna is ‘Extreme’.) After humans, these invasive species are next most responsible for the decimation of Australia’s unique flora and fauna. The carnivores take out the fauna (the foxes and cats alone take out millions of native animals nightly, and are almost solely responsible for the loss of 20 native animal species) and the herbivores “graze the desert to dust and turn wetlands to mud barrens.” 

What has this to do with the dingo? A lot! As Australia’s apex predator, the ‘ecosystem services’ the animal provides are, researchers are discovering, invaluable. “Dingoes play a vital ecological role in Australia by outcompeting and displacing noxious introduced predators like feral cats and foxes. When dingoes are left alone, there are fewer feral predators eating native marsupials, birds and lizards” – Prof Bradshaw.

Dingoes may be enemy No. 1 in the eyes of sheep farmers, but cattle farmers (as well as the native fauna) should thank their lucky stars to have them around. “Dingoes can also increase profits for cattle graziers, because they target and eat kangaroos that otherwise compete with cattle for grass in semi-arid pasture lands”  -Prof B once more.

And according to Dr. Mike Letnic, Centre for Ecosystem Science UNSW, “the dingo, as Australia’s top predator, has an important role in maintaining the balance of nature and that reintroduced or existing dingo populations could increase biodiversity across more than 2 million square kilometres of Australia.” Where dingoes had been exterminated, Dr. Letnic found far greater numbers of red foxes and invasive herbivores, with small native mammals and grasses being lost.

As the re-introduction of grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park famously proved, from the presence of an apex predator flows a trophic cascade of ecological benefits. In the dingo’s case, the trophic cascade emanating from this particular apex predator flows all the way down and into the soil itself. And for the research that uncovered this surprising benefit, the infamous Dingo Fence for once worked in the animal’s favour:

“The fence provides a unique opportunity to test the effects of the removal of an apex predator on herbivore abundance, vegetation and nutrients in the soil,” says researcher Timothy Morris.

From comparing the conditions in the outback on either side of the fence came forth the revelation that exterminating dingoes not only has an adverse effect on the abundance of other native animals and plants, but also degrades the quality of the soil.

Far from supporting a continued assault on this much maligned creature, all the evidence supports “allowing dingo populations to increase”. More dingoes, not less are Australia’s prerequisite to “enhancing the productivity of ecosystems across vast areas of the country.”

Oh Aussie legislators and ranchers, you are getting it so wrong. Stop demonising and destroying this ‘wild, magnificent creature’, and let us see Canis dingo running free for millennia to come.

*********

If you are of the same mind, please sign and share these petitions:

Petition to remove dingoes from the Pest List

Petition to save dingoes from extinction – re-classify as an endangered species

Petition to stop the promotion of a new export market — Australian dingoes for Asian diners

Petition to stop the use of toxin 1080 to poison dingoes

If the dingo teaches us anything as human beings, surely it’s this:

“As they have demonstrated time and again, large carnivores will not stay within human defined safe zones. We need to learn to share the land and its bounty with them, to live with them, or we will lose them—and with them a considerable part of what makes us human.” 

Mark Derr, Saving The Large Carnivores, Psychology Today

Sources

Dingoes should remain a distinct species in Australia

11 Wild Facts About Dingoes

Dingo – Wiki

Dingo Fence – Wiki

Dingo dualisms: Exploring the ambiguous identity of Australian dingoes

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf: is the dingo friend or foe?

Last howl of the dingo: the legislative, ecological and practical issues arising from the kill-or-conserve dilemma

Thirteen mammal extinctions prevented by havens

Dingoes, like wolves, are smarter than pet dogs

Time for a bold dingo experiment in NSW national park

Careful using that f-word to describe dingoes

Invasive Species in Australia – Wiki

Culling is no danger to the future of dingoes on Fraser Island

Fraser Island ‘pure bred’ dingoes could be extinct in 10 years

Dingo fence study shows dingo extermination leads to poorer soil

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A Dingo is a Dingo Not a Dog – & Why That Really Matters There is little doubt that the dingo is the most reviled of all Australian mammals  Aussies, as we all know, have a multitude of colourful expressions, some printable and others less so.

[studyhelianthus]

A Pirate Story: Boca Raton Legends.

La Boca del Ratón and/or “Thieves’ Inlet”!?

If Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and ‘discovered’ America in 1492, then Florida was ‘saved’ by Latin American culture, since the English saw the land as temporarily reserved. 

My analogy of  Queen Nur ‘s re-telling of a latino folktale, sometimes called The Barking Mouse:  Boca Raton got it’s name ‘La Boca del Ratón’ or ‘The Mouse’s Mouth’, because when there were pirates smuggling things passed the rugged rocks within the lagoon and into Spanish American colonies it was essential to know at least two languages. For the Contraband (Colonial Spanish America) smuggling, fraud, illicit commerce, and illegal trade were vital elements for the economic success, the growth of the contraband’s income and it’s total market value of goods and services. 

ROWF!! GGROOWFF! ROWF!! WARF! Heh. Para- language is based on pairing the sound/tone, speed, quality/intensity, and onomatopoeia (or creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests sounds that are not real words, like “oooh”) with one’s spoken language and physical features, such as facial expressions, like a smirk, or gestures, like pointing. Other methods of communication beyond spoken languages are written language, kinesics or  body movements and gestures, and proxemics or personal space. So, when the mouse barks in the book by Antonio Sacre called, The Barking Mouse, think of how different forms of communication can drive out the darkness with the light of understanding.

Lingua Franca is a pidgin, a simplified version of one language that combines the vocabulary of a number of different languages. A trade language is a third language used by numerous communities around the Mediterranean, to communicate with diverse groups of people in different countries. Creole languages, such as Portuguese, become the primary language of an area when a pidgin is used frequently over the period. Cape Verdean Creole is the most widely-spoken Portuguese-based creole languages. Understanding is at the roots of love; those who don’t attempt to overcome language barriers to power through ‘effective communication’, burn their country’s soil, so that no one ever grows. 

Pirates began raiding the Florida’s coast when the Spanish, the first Europeans, settled here in the 1500′s. When pirates were given permission to raid and pillage Florida towns on behalf of a government, they were called privateers; therefore, Christopher Columbus was a privateer, a legal private! The English established their first colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, and the Pilgrims - founders of the New Plymouth Colony (meaning "mouth of the River Plym") - arrived to Massachusetts in 1620; in consequence, the Native Americans began to perish. By 1650, England had formed a dominant presence on the Atlantic coast. 

More than 50 years before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, the first true Thanksgiving took place in St. Augustine, Florida.  According to the National Park Service, La Florida was first influenced by Spanish traditions from the Iberian peninsula. The culture that emerged in the colonial New World was a mixture of European, African, and local Native customs. "Latinized" America at the time became a diverse, capable, and complex society. As stated in the proceedings of the Annual International Native American Language Issues (NALI), Effective Language Education Practices and Native Language Survival, the United States has been the home of more bilinguals than any other nation in world history. We have been living in the home of more bilinguals than any other country in the world, way before the 1988 Florida Official English Amendment: the passing of English-only laws.

The Spanish were open to having interracial marriages between the natives (Timucua) and the colonists, because it was a way of survival, and without it the colonies may have not lasted long; therefore, it was essential to know at least two languages. The genocide of the Taíno (Arawaks) - the native people of the northern Caribbean (present-day Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, etc.) - took place between 1492-1518, when the Spanish were led by Christopher Columbus. They killed men, women, children, and even babies; genocide and disease wiped out approximately 3 million of the 3.5 million inhabitants of Hispaniola. In the event of the Spanish missions in Florida, the souls of the Timucua were saved. The native people were transformed into loyal Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown, and mixed-race people were placed below the pure Spanish and above the pure natives. 

In 1566, Martín de Argüelles was the first child born of European ancestry recorded in the Spanish settlement of Saint Augustine, Spanish Florida. His parents were Martín de Argüelles (Sr.) and Leonor Morales.  His father, Martín Argüelles Sr., was one of the privateers who came to ‘New Spain’ or  ‘La Florida’ in the New World with Captain General Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. During the development of the ‘New World’, money really seemed to be the root of all evil, but before the global possession of the Leprechaun, we were always enchanted by the ‘Demon of Fear’. Fear incites the rejection of diversity and a belief in scarcity. For this reason, ancient wars were fought for commodities and land or territory. Now, the monetary system controls us and plays on our fears by triggering a real sense of scarcity and hierarchical power, which sets the stage for competition and warfare. 

Nevertheless, the Spanish colonized American because they were in search for gold and silver, but they didn’t find anything. In spite of that, the Spanish accumulated their riches when they conquered the Aztec in Central America during the Spanish–Aztec War (1519–21), and Inca Empires in South America. They were able to colonize the south after ambushing and seizing the Inca’s ruler,  Atahualpa, in the 1532 Battle of Cajamarca, and engrossing themselves in 40 years of war which ended in 1572. Spanish was the official language of New Spain, and those who did not know it sought Nahuatl-speaking priests to communicate with Spanish rulers. Nahuatl, a native American language spoken by the Aztec, was the ‘Lingua Franca’ throughout Spanish North America, as it was used in trade and the courts. As stated by  Legends and Chronicles - a site dedicated to ancient history and mythology - King Philip II of Spain decreed in 1570 that Nahuatl become the official language of the colonies of New Spain, in order to facilitate communication between the natives of the colonies. 

Florida Memory, the state archives of Florida, documents the first arrival of African slaves to St. Augustine in 1581. Not too long after, the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown Colony, would be established on May 14, 1607.  The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), writes that fugitive slaves were escaping from enslavement in the Carolinas and Georgia to Florida for sanctuary and freedom. Sometime between March and November of 1738, the Spanish settlers in Florida formed a town named Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, two miles to the north of St. Augustine. Spanish Florida was now the African-American slaves’ first Promised Land. Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose was a free black settlement that came to be known as Fort Mose. 

BLACKBEARD

Well... As the legend goes, approximately three years after an English pirate named Blackbeard, Edward Teach or Edward Thatch, fought in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), he wrecked havoc in the Gulf of Mexico amongst Spanish merchant’s ships; thereafter, he became known at the ‘El Gran Diablo’ (Spanish for ‘The Great Devil’). El Gran Diablo’s low-spirited crew were still dissatisfied; they wanted gold, so they sailed to the Florida coast to retrieve the treasures from the Spanish fleet that was previously wrecked in 1715.

The 1715 Treasure Fleet or Spanish Treasure Convoy was use to transport European goods annually from metropolitan Spain (’the mother country’) to the Spanish colonies in the Americas, such as, gold and silver. This fleet was seen as the holy grail and an irresistible target for ruthless pirates. Nevertheless, on July 31, 1715, seven days after departing from Havana, Cuba, eleven out of twelve ships were lost in a hurricane near present-day Vero Beach, Florida.

Now, ‘El Gran Diablo’ and his crew wanted to take possession of the remainder, but scavengers had already taken what was visible to the naked eye. Eventually, he moved north and when we reached the Topsail Inlet, on June, 3, 1718, his flagship - the Queen Anne’s Revenge - ran aground and sank. Four months later, Judge Nicholas Trott sentenced Bonnet to death, and he was said to be hung in Charleston, South Carolina, but he didn’t die yet. He was said to have died in a bloody battle, where he was beheaded to ensure his death. His head was displayed on his enemy’s ship, and his body was thrown into the sea.

CAPTAIN GENERAL PEDRO MENÈDEZ

The British attacked St. Augustine, and destroyed Fort Mose. The Spanish reconstructed Fort Mose in 1752; the settlement had a church and 22 huts housing nearly 100 people. As for Menendez, he was captured and sold as a slave, but by 1759 he was free and once again in command. At this time, Fort Mose consisted of 37 men, 15 women, seven boys and eight girls. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) continues to note that in 1763, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish were forced to abandon Florida but gained Cuba in return. In August, Menendez led 48 men, women and children on the schooner ‘Nuestra Senora de los Dolores’ (spanish for ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’) and sailed to Cuba, where they settled in Regla, a town near the city of Havana. 

Hence, Fort Mose is now memorialized as a national historic landmark, and Florida was saved by Latin American culture! Think about it. If Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and ‘discovered’ America in 1492, then Florida was indeed ‘saved’ by Latin American culture, since the English saw the land as temporarily reserved.

[ecotone99]

[SF] The Skittering - Part I: The Scream

The scream is heard by all in the settlement. Some hear it through proximity, others feel the disruption stemming from it’s cause, even more will hear about the scream in stories. Screams tear through the still morning air, evaporating the fog and dew that lie in their path. Screams rip communities apart, forcing those who would normally sleep through disturbance to wake and revel in someone else’s misery.

And as the scream that erupted from Ms. Sallih Haawks roused the tenants of her settlement, the scream’s source forced the residents of New Tulsa to suffer a worse fate. The reason for the scream, an unusual sound to come from the normally timid schoolmarm, was an event that everyone anticipated, but no one expected. Drills, lessons, awareness, all meaningless when left with the grim reality of what an entire town prepared for.

Of course, when children are prepared for the inevitable return of The Skittermen, some details are left obfuscated. Namely that Skittermen don’t communicate through words, but by pointing.

And today, they were pointing west.

But Sallih didn’t know it was west. The sun barely peaking over the horizon. Her movement was quick, and gingerly. She had been sleeping in a different bed that evening, it gets lonely and Henk Jowns will stay as loyal as he needs to be from a distance. Ms. Haawks had her eyes low, to both see her way clearly and to avoid unwanted conversation with the townsfolk.

This wasn’t an everyday occurrence for Sallih, but it wasn’t her first tryst with Henk either. Its a clear run between bunk houses, into her quarters, with at least an hour left before classes begin.

“No chipped teeth.” As the saying on her planet goes.

Which was the first thing that struck her as unusual, the teeth.

Cutting the corner between the bunk house and the commissary, Sallih noticed the unmistakable shape of a lower mandible, a small one, full row of teeth. A child’s no doubt. The teeth catching what little light the clouds granted passage, and reflecting onto the dewy grass. The upper part of the skull was a few feet away, followed by a finger, a tuft of long jet black hair. This trail of viscera leading to an arrowhead of carefully selected and placed human remains. Due West, the townspeople would later acknowledge, perfectly aligned with a compass.

Having only been alive for 24 seasons, Sallih was old enough to know the procedure, but naive towards the brutal reality of the ceremony. Upon reaching pubescence, the townsfolk of New Tulsa hear the details that the nursery rhymes and folk-songs leave out.

Oh Ther’ ain’t no way Ther’ ain’t no way No Ther’ ain’t no way to know When they’ll pop on up And they’ll scoop you up And they’ll tell us where to go

In Earth Year 2069, technology became available that allowed humans to enter into a harmless state of hibernation. The United States, having been forced to move its massive coastal population inward, commissioned dozens of ships to relocate it’s citizens to atmospherically suitable planets. A list was compiled of celestial bodies within a few hundred years journey, that had the building blocks for terraforming.

Of the 35 ships launched, 16 made it to their destinations. Eight of them successfully terraformed, seven were capable of sustaining life. Tulsa Oklahoma’s ship last reported a successful atmospheric redesign, seed bombs were germinating within necessary outputs, and the life support systems showed only a 3% die off rate. But no communication was ever established. New Memphis (or MIII to locals, paying homage to Memphis already being a stolen name) achieved the greatest bounty to extract from their new homeland. And quickly became the galactic capital for humanity’s new home worlds.

In the hundreds of years that the ships took to reach their destinations, and the additional hundreds of years of automated terraforming, Earth had perished. The number of Earthlings left in the entire universe sat comfortably in the 400,000 range.

What the scanners and algorithms failed to predict about New Tulsa’s home planet, was the complex social structures existing meters below the surface. The Skittermen, as the residents quickly learned to call them, could best be described as insectoid, sharing many superficial similarities to cicadas. But the disruption of their atmosphere has caused a resource management issue.

The Skittermen quickly learned that their new neighbors had to be given a little instruction. Human waste and refuse contain valuable minerals and nutrients, they seep into the earth, and allow the subterranean hives to thrive temporarily. But over-saturation of these nutrients disrupts delicate balances in the soil. With the new environmental hurdles from man’s bio-engineering taken into account, the Skittermen must corral the humans to the next patch of suitable land.

Millions of years of divergent evolution, separated by the vast nothing of space. Some communication breakdown is bound to occur. Mankind will never know that this perverse desecration of life is simply one species trying to communicate with another. The Skittermen have no capacity to understand that the denizens of New Tulsa never meant them any harm.

Sallih of course, never knew about any of that. Her great-great grandfather had come across the stars as a boy. He told his children every detail that he could remember from his seven years on Earth (the old country, a playful continuation of an adage that independently sprouted on all of Earth’s colonies.) He was torn to shreds and his body was used to guide their people onto the next patch of land. This was 25 years before her birth, the most recent Skittering.

“Having a family member become a sacred guide is an honor.” Sallih’s mother would remind her during the annual day of remembrance. “And they say it happens so quick you don’t have time to wake up.”

It never made her feel any better. Sallih’s mother never got to meet her great-grandfather. Thus putting another degree of separation between Sallih, and tales of the old world. At this point no one could discern between truth and fables. Light with no fire, talking boxes from across the world, cold metal bent into any structure imaginable.

The cargo bay on USSF TULSA never opened when its inhabitants were woken up. And other than what could be scrapped from the hibernation chambers so many years ago, all infrastructure was created on planet with native resources. The Millennials on board, in their 80s when they entered suspended animation, tried to share as much knowledge as they could. Six generations have passed without any aid from the government of their now dead planet, the citizens of New Tulsa had very little connection to their homeland. Tall tales, legends, an heirloom fire-tending tool fashioned from a broken piece of carbon fiber. This was all that remained of planet Earth.

But those weren’t the remains that Sallih concerned herself with this morning. After the initial screech of horror and sadness, the mental forensics begin. Black hair, small jaw, a child. One of hers? Gena, or Annaheigh perhaps.

The disgust prevents anything in her body from moving save her eyes. Desperate to find cloture by identifying this dismantled corpse. Sallih’s eyes quickly lock with a singular, dark green iris, attached to an eyeball, that is sitting freely in the grass, a few paces further into the arrow.

Black hair, small jaw, green eyes. Its Rochille, not one of her students, but a fixture on the playground and in school functions and productions. A girl with promise, and moxy. A girl that now barely exists, tattered remnants of bone and ligaments directing Sallih towards her inevitable new home.

Rochille was a sweet girl, her mother died in childbirth. Father couldn’t bear the guilt and took his own life three years ago. The townsfolk will call it an accident, but Sallih knew the truth. Henk is the coroner’s apprentice, and he spills all the details to Sallih. There is a small, but noticeable comfort in the idea of their family being reunited.

“Do you think Heaven is like Earth was? Or is it like New Tulsa?” Sallih had asked Henk playfully under the blankets one morning.

“Do you think Heaven is real?” Henk countered.

Christianity is still practiced by a minority of Humans in New Tulsa. Not at Earth levels of popularity, and its transmutated given the separation between its origin point, and where humans have brought it. Sallih was far from devout but began to pray immediately. The tears took a few minutes to arrive, but they made their presence known via heavy sobs and gasps, between the occasional bouts of vomiting. Her curly blonde hair cascading over the thin frame of her shoulders with every convulsion.

Jewne Tillimund, who had been born 77 winters earlier, was the first to answer Sallih’s call into the void. Jewne and her wife domesticated and raised a peculiar species of rodentesque creature, that could be sheered for a substance structurally similar to wool. Rharmins, to the settlers of this land. Proved invaluable for the continued survival of the New Tulsans. Wool, meat, companionship. Depending on the breed this versatile, eight-legged, rat filled many niches.

Jewne approaches Sallih, her feet silent through years of sneaking up on small creatures. She places a hand on the weeping teacher’s back and coos.

“Honey we gotta get up. Scavengers’ll be this way soon, and we’ve all got to pack.”

Sallih looks up at the wizened, kind gaze of a woman who had seen more than she’d care to discuss. Between the tears in her eyes, and the free-flowing mucous leaking onto her vomit caked mouth, she managed to mimic the expression of a smile. Jewne continues.

“One of yours?” Her hand lazily gesturing towards the child’s remains.

Sallih sputters a few consonants before settling on “No.”

“No it was the orphan girl, Rochille. At least shes wi…wit..with..”

“She’s with her family now, correct.” Not one to just watch someone suffer Jewne mercifully completes Sallih’s sentence. “Now take one more minute, breathe through that little button nose of yours, and pull yourself together. Before you end up all over the place like that little girl.”

Sallih, more repulsed by the irreverence to this death than anything a Skitterman could do, shot her ad hoc grief counselor a daggered, judgmental gaze. Jewne, sensing that the joke didn’t land continues.

“Aw honey I’m just trying to keep things light. Today is gonna get worse, best get used to laughing at the gallows.” Jewne begins to shuffle towards her home.

“Like I said baby, one more minute, I’ll get the kettle on.”

Sallih pays her no mind as the elderly figure disappears into the mist. And as one unwanted guest to this tragedy leaves, several more enter. Jacho, Umberto, and Rahlay. Three young men about town who fancy themselves keepers of the peace. Jacho, the leader and current suitor towards Ms. Haawks speaks first.

“What a terrible sight for you to have uncovered here on this morning so dreary, my lady.”

The words slide out of his mouth with the confidence of a fat kid in a pool. Jacho was strong, and he was brave, but he was not bright. He continues.

“And whence all is complete … we shall have a new home, perhaps a home shared by us in holy matrim…”

Before Jacho’s poorly timed proposal can be completed, a voice from the mist interrupts.

“God dammit Jacho Perstinct, you leave that poor teacher alone. She’s seen enough horror today to have to deal with the prospect of listening to your dumb ass talk for the rest of her days, no sir.”

Jewne returns to the bloody scene. Finger waving at the gum-brained gentlemen caller.

“I got a kettle on, she’s gonna have a hot cup, then we’re all gonna get situated. You know what this means, and it don’t mean anything about gettin’ your rocks rolled!”

Her hand, as if she was wiping salt off an invisible table, lets the boys know its time to scram. She shouts one more instruction as they hustle away.

“And get the goddamn mayor!”

submitted by /u/eetandern [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2P1X46G

[allbeendonebefore]

rhinocio replied to your chat “Someone: Why are Albertans so angry? Me: Hey let me explain to you the...”

Hey I'd actually like to know the answer GREAT TEACHER HAPO PLEASE BESTOW THE LEARNINGS

I don’t know how concisely I can put this, and I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know if there is just some inherent anger that you’re born with or you inherit. I don’t know why we are consistently the angriest (read: most easily offended) province on those random articles, I just know that we are and it’s true.

But I can take you backwards through my understanding at least. I want to preface this by saying I use ‘we’ rather loosely, I don’t actually implicate myself in every single opinion or situation but I am thinking of it as part of a collective memory/history that I’m situated in and shaped by. This is a simplified history that misses a lot but covers a broad scope, I hope.

This got... really political and I ended up kind of getting emotional/personal so be mindful of how you share it, please.

I think in its most concise way it’s a combination of desperation and lack of control. I think our generation - in Canada generally - has a huge frustration with our national dependence on this one non-renewable resource that causes so much damage, and I think there is a lot of frustration and conflict because of that dependence. It’s an anger that results partially at its core out of acknowledging that dependence, acknowledging its not a good situation, and then frustration with people “outside” the issue who don’t understand. I think a lot of our problems have related back to this in the past half century since we started developing this resource in ‘47

But the other side of the issue is politics that date back further. We are angry all over again because it’s like the 1970s-80s, another Trudeau in power, more measures to make sure the profit off our resource and our labour is shared nationally, and then even when we agree it is supporting the nation it’s like everyone is getting in the way and everyone is making it difficult and everyone is yelling at us while profiting and benefiting off of what we do. After the fire, after the elections, everyone is extra tense and uncertain and very very scared. We have no patience for empty words and empty gestures. The companies got the people away from the fire, and a lot of people owe their allegiance and their livelihood to the companies and not the governments. People don’t understand that. I find in our experience - as Quatsch was hitting on in the original post - that there’s a lot of gaslighting - not always intentional - when talking to people from Eastern (Ont/Qc) Canada who Don’t Get It and Therefore it’s Not Real Because Everyone Has Problems - this just makes us angrier. 

This Alberta is in part made up of a generation who remembers the National Energy Program in the 80s and has viewed the federal government as an entity that takes and never gives, something that Alberta had to make cuts to itself to stop. This Alberta is made up of a generation who remembers a premier who cut taxes and blew up hospitals and gave everyone cash to line their own pockets that could have been used to provide them basic services, a government who for the last 44 years both fought to keep this resource to benefit us, and fought to keep us dependent on it with no way out because we Can’t Afford to Lose that Foreign Investment by demanding benefits. This generation was and now is too afraid to leave the status quo that they don’t always recognize when tradition can be harmful, that history repeats itself whether Liberal or Conservative. 

But the generations before that in turn led us here. barely two decades before oil was struck, the federal government actually gave us the legal capacity to control our own resources. This was a right that was thirty years too late, a right that all other provinces outside the prairies, even the ones otherwise cheated by Confederation, retained upon entrance. The right was given to us and we were left as dust in the wind during the Depression. There was a reason why the angry farmer government got into power and the desperation of social credit’s birth to loophole the federal stranglehold after.

And before that when we entering Confederation, when my great grandparents came to settle on this land that was not theirs, people like them were only allowed in out of desperation. They were desperate to escape misery in eastern europe, and the federal government was desperate to attract people who were both white and christian even if they were the ‘wrong kind’. They were forbidden to speak their own languages and they were placed in internment camps the moment their former homelands went to war because they couldn’t be trusted. Many changed their names to sound more ‘English’ because if nothing else they were still white and christian- many other people who were interned or trapped on reserves before that didn’t have that luxury. 

And before that when we were still part of the Northwest Territories and just a fantastical periphery for Canada that may or may not have been worthy of resource extraction, the sea of worthless grass that blocked Canada from the Pacific, the federal government bought the land for pennies from people who did not own it. The federal government imposed a foreign two party system of ‘self government’ onto people who’s self-determination was not even recognized. The government did not even inform the people living there that they were now being governed. The sons and daughters of white fur traders and First Nations women, once able to negotiate and navigate that space between those worlds no longer belonged to either of them. People watched Manitoba dragged into Confederation with no titles to land, with a leader who would be arrested if he ever set foot in Ottawa to claim rights for his people. People watched him hanged in Saskatchewan after he returned to lead them. People watched as settlers from Ontario pushed the Metis further west and the First Nations off their traditional land. People watched as American whiskey traders pushed north, the massacre of First Nations people at Cypress Hills, Alberta. The predecessors of the RCMP arrived to wipe the whiskey traders out and instead let them settle and build frontier towns, and they knew the treaties did not restrict First Nations people to the reserves but were forced to keep them there because Ottawa viewed them as helpless, as dependent, as children, and their land as a potential resource that could be owned. This ideology positioned the title-less settlers Northwestern Territory as second class, the First Nations as third class wards of the state, and the Metis an anomaly. The difference between the prairies and the territories was simply that the territories were economically worthless to Canada; they felt barely any responsibility to the people who were not white, english speaking, anglo saxon protestants, and the west had those in abundance. The segregation between settler and First Nations persists and is at its highest tension in rural areas, where property rights are still used as justification to murder innocent people, over a century after the battle of Batoche.

To wrap up this rant I just want to say that while i am very angry and passionate about history- history that I had to find for myself because our settler colonial privilege is dependent on not teaching this history as mandatory - I am also very proud of my province’s history. I truly believe we need to move beyond looking at Alberta - at the West - at Canada - as resources and as property. I think we as Albertans are defensive over our backyards to the point where introspection, questioning our ground, is viewed as a weakness and gives others license to tell us what to do. I think we forget that we haven’t had a choice in a long time. 

I think the actions of my government - who i voted into power and still believe in - are swayed to appeal to people who view themselves as disenfranchised and backed into corners. I think people forget that for every Albertan who’s job is dependent on the pipelines, there is an Albertan who’s well-being is dependent on that land being left undisturbed. I think there is a reason that every time - every single time (out of only five changes!) there has been a change in government in Alberta’s history, it is driven by that frustration and demand for change and self-determination. 

I think despite the amount of death threats our premier receives for being a woman and for her political stripes on a daily basis, despite the fact that she’s made some political blunders and despite the fact that she has to appeal to the people who are still very dependent on that resource and people who are still very angry at other governments tying our hands... I think that she and I believe in the same things. In a province that is both free from our dependence on a dead end, a province that is welcoming to people of all backgrounds and identities, a province that is strong and free but supported by our neighbours who can depend on us in return. I think there’s more to the province than a century of emotional and cultural repression and some dirt in the ground. And I think other people think that too. And this isn’t an opinion I feel comfortable sharing with the people I went to school with growing up, so I tend not to express it.

tl;dr when your friend gets mad at you when you tell them to quit smoking all the time, maybe take two seconds to re-evaluate what the real problems are that caused them to be dependent on it instead of grabbing the cigarettes out of their hand. 

[solivar]

WIP: Massacre In Deadlock Gorge

An investigative report by Olivia Colomar of Paranormal New Mexico.

If you like what you read, kindly throw a penny in the tip jar: https://ko-fi.com/nagaina

Deadlock Gorge.

It’s a name that catches the imagination almost immediately, harkening back as it does to the days of the Wild West, of handsome cowboys and grizzled old prospectors, wagon trains full of tenderfoot settlers, Pony Express riders and stagecoaches and the black-hatted outlaws who robbed them all. That is, of course, not its only name -- only the most recent, and likely the most famous, for a variety of reasons.

The Ancestral Puebloans left ruins there, as they did in so many other high-walled canyons in the Four Corners, but even now their descendants do not give it a name. In fact, my regular Puebloan cultural experts flatly refused to speak with me about the place at all. The Spanish settlers who made their homes around Albuquerque called it El Cañon del Viento Cortante, the Canyon of the Biting Wind, though its position tends to be rather nomadic on antique maps of the region housed in the University of New Mexico Anthropology Department’s library. The Navajo bands who were its closest neighbors simply called it the Hungry Place and shunned it with astonishing enthusiasm given the presence of readily available water, arable land at its widest point, and the shelter to be found within its network of water-carved sandstone caves. Today it lies entirely inside the boundaries of the expanded Navajo Reservation Annex and is only desultorily patrolled by Reservation police. It came by its present name, of course, thanks to the infamous Deadlock Gang, who used it as their base of operations as they marauded across Native communities and Anglo settlements, prospecting outfits and isolated ranches, before the final bloody confrontation within the canyon’s walls brought an end to their reign of terror.

In fact, Deadlock Gorge appears to have had a rather significant history of violence, stretching back as far into history as I’ve been able to research and very much extending to the present day. It was, as of this writing, only ten years ago that the art colony established there by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters came to a grisly and, to date, unexplained end.

*

It was just after midnight on October 29th when the call came in to McKinley County 911. Veteran operator Melissa Rosales received that first frantic call for help.

Melissa Rosales is a petite woman who wears her graying brown hair in an asymetrical style that flatters her pixieish face. Her eyes are framed in crow’s feet and the years have gifted her with a generous portion of laugh lines. She is smiling as we sit down together at Cafe Pasqual to talk once she’s done her shift. She still works at the county 911 office, as a supervisor, and she says that, over the years, she has received many calls that have stayed with her: the young family caught in their vehicle in the midst of rising flood waters during a freakishly powerful storm, the two year old bitten by a rattlesnake in her family’s garden, more than one car accident involving drunken college students and long haul transport rigs on the interstate. None of them haunt her like the frantic cries that came from Deadlock Gorge that night in October ten years ago.

“It was almost Halloween, and it was a full moon -- that whole week was crazy, weird calls every day. The night before, someone called to report a chupacabra raiding their compost bin. Can you believe it?” Melissa laughs, shaking her head, but the humor doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It isn’t always like that on the full moon but that month, it surely was. When the first calls came in, Ms. Colomar, I freely confess that we didn’t know what to believe.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #1 12:07 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Unidentified Woman:

Help...please help…

911 Operator:

We will certainly do so, ma’am, but I need you to tell me where you are.

Unidentified Woman:

Deadlock...We’re...We’re in Deadlock Gorge, just off 66, the Starry Desert Center For the Arts -- [static] -- ter’s residency at the edge of town. Something --

911 Operator:

Ma’am, could you please tell me the nature of the emergency? Do you need fire and rescue services? Emergency medical services? Police?

Unidentified Woman:

I -- I -- I don’t know I don’t know. I’m at the window, the front window of the writer’s residency parlor and and I see...someone’s lying in the street. They’re not moving, they’re not moving, I think they might be dead, the street lights are out I can’t -- [static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am can you hear me? [pause] Ma’am?

Unidentified Woman:

[whispering] I hear something right outside. I can hear it breathing. I think it can hear me, too. Oh God I think it can hear me too.

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

“There are all sorts of weird stories about the Gorge -- I sure you’ve heard more than a few of them.” Melissa fiddles with her necklace as she speaks, a delicate silver chain hung with turquoise beads, a strangely nervous gesture for a woman who otherwise comes across as bedrock settled, coolly calm and collected. “That it’s haunted, that it’s cursed, you know how it is. I was half convinced, given how close it was to Halloween, that it could be some kind of stupid prank, college kids with nothing better to do. Then the second call came in.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #2 12:12 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Anita Colomar (Writer’s Residency Director at Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences):

Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences, 66 Canyon Drive, in Deadlock Gorge. Please send police and emergency medical services.

911 Operator:

Ma’am, can you tell me the nature of the emergency?

Anita Colomar:

I’m...not entirely certain myself. Power is out in the gorge -- I heard an...I don’t want to say an explosion but...it could have been. It was loud -- loud enough to wake me and several of the residents out of a sound sleep and --

[A high-pitched sound cuts across the recording, followed by several seconds of intense static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?

Anita Colomar:

Yes -- yes, I can hear you. Did you hear that?

911 Operator:

Yes, I did. That was at your end?

Anita Colomar:

It was. I think -- was that coming from outside? Candace, can you see?

[Inaudibly muffled voices from off the line, a sequence of loud bangs, a short scream that terminates abruptly]

Jeff, Candy, push my dresser in front of the door. Hurry. Officer, I think someone may be inside the residency building --

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

I suppose I should confess, at this point, that my interest in the incident that took place at the Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences -- the so-called Massacre In Deadlock Gorge -- is not entirely one of a neutral observer. My aunt, my father’s younger sister, Anita Colomar, was the director of the writer’s residency at the time and one of the few people to have verifiable contact with emergency services on the night of the incident itself. In fact, the woman sitting across from me was, in all likelihood, one of the last people to ever speak to her.

“I dispatched police as soon as the first call came in.” Melissa says, her tone quiet and apologetic, as though she has something to apologize for. “When the second came in, I also dispatched emergency services. And after that, well…”

My FOIA request to the McKinley County 911 dispatch office for calls related to the incident in Deadlock Gorge yielded eighty-seven individual call records and associated transcripts concentrated in a single twenty-five minute period between 12:07 am and 12:32 am. Most of the calls are no more than a few seconds long and consist almost entirely of static, snatches of loud noises, and incoherent voices. Cellular contact with the Gorge failed entirely by no later than 12:33 am. The first law enforcement responders arrived at the edge of the canyon three minutes later. The motivators and antigrav units in their vehicles failed as they crossed beneath the sandstone arch that marks the entrance to the town proper, forcing them to approach the cluster of darkened structures clinging to the mid-canyon escarpment on foot. What they found once they arrived exceeded the expectations of even the most experienced officers but not those of the dispatchers, whose lines had by then fallen eerily silent.

“I’m sorry that we couldn’t do more that night, though to this day I’m not sure if there was more to do.” Melissa tells me as we step outside into the warm summer evening, ten years removed from the cold and dark of that night. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

*

Deadlock Gorge first enters the “modern” historical record in documents dating from the early 1700s, copies of reports written to and by the assorted Spanish colonial governors of Villa de Alburquerque, as the city was known at that time, a strategic military outpost along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. It was this military significance, and resultant presence of a fairly hefty armed garrison, that led the rancheros living west of the city -- in what is today McKinley County -- to repeatedly beg the assistance of their governor when it came to keeping marauders out of their flocks. The ranchers mostly raised sheep (for their wool -- early Albuquerque was a major center for the New World textiles trade) and goats (for their meat and milk) and in the autumn of 1711, something was taking a sizeable chunk out of that trade, whole flocks, and whole shepherds, going missing. Evidence suggested that the missing livestock and farmers were disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, into El Cañon del Viento Cortante, a deep, twisting canyon of red sandstone walls, one end of which formed a natural border between several different ranching concerns.

The wealthy Spanish landowners were losing money hand over fist, they were having trouble retaining trustworthy workers, and they insisted, in a flurry of letters growing gradually shriller as the year wore on, that the governor had to send troops to help rout out the source of their trouble. Frankly, they suspected marauding natives clever enough to cover up the evidence of the depredations. Finally aggravated beyond endurance by all the whining, from sheep ranchers and wool merchants alike, a detachment of soldiers under an experienced native-fighting commander was sent to investigate the situation in El Cañon del Viento Cortante, kill whatever needed to be killed, soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, and return with proof that the matter was handled.

The detachment never returned.

In fact, nothing of them was ever seen or heard from again. No remains were ever found. No indications of battle -- pitched or otherwise -- were found. No evidence of ambush, either. The local Native bands who came to trade in Albuquerque disclaimed any knowledge of the thefts or the fate of the Spanish soldiers but issued an unusually blunt warning: El Cañon del Viento Cortante was not a good place, was not a safe place, and that was why no member of any band not insane, desperate, or outcast chose to make a home there. It would be best if the Spaniards left it alone, as well.

The governor of Albuquerque quietly arranged for the ranchers to be compensated for their losses and urged them to abandon the territory immediately surrounding El Cañon del Viento Cortante. Fragmentary records exist to suggest this may have happened -- or that the ranchers, like their unfortunate herds, employees, and soldiers, also vanished into the hungry maw of the canyon.

*

Sergeant Andrew Flores of the New Mexico State Police was the first police responder to reach Deadlock Gorge on the night of the incident, followed closely by three black-and-white cruisers rerouted from patrols in nearby communities. He organized the group and led them into town on foot after all their vehicles failed, more or less simultaneously. He recounts the way the night unfolded to me as we sit together in the living room of his trim little cabin outside Chimayó, drinking iced tea and eating a meal he has prepared using the vegetables grown in his own garden. He retired from the State Police three years ago and settled down in this vibrant little town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to write his memoirs and to raise heirloom produce for sale in the local farmer’s market. He does, in fact, have plenty to write about but, even so, the incident in Deadlock Gorge stands out in his memory as the strangest of many strange experiences.

“It’s a cliche but I guess that’s for a reason,” Former Officer Flores laughs, shaking his head slightly. “‘Twas a dark and stormy night,’ you know? The moon was full -- I recall that vividly -- but it hardly mattered because heavy weather was rolling in from the north and the moon was playing hide and seek with the clouds. One minute it was almost as bright as noon, shining off the canyon walls and the streets and the buildings, and the next it was as dark as the bottom of a well, no lights anywhere except ours, not even battery powered emergency lights.”

The town of Deadlock Gorge is built atop a midlevel escarpment a couple hundred feet down from the rim of the canyon at its extreme northern and narrowest end, straddling a relatively short and dangerously curvy stretch of Historic Route 66 that exits the canyon headed west, into Arizona. That particular stretch of HR 66 was, at one point, a shepherd’s trail, used to usher flocks of sheep and goats between one pasturage and another, and then a wagon trail, used by settlers traveling west, hopefully to California. The original town sprung up to tend to the needs of weary travelers and consisted of a boarding house, a saloon, a dry goods store, a livery stable, and a blacksmith. Of those original buildings, only the boarding house survived the raid that put an end to the Deadlock Gang -- survived it in good enough condition that efforts were made to preserve it by the New Mexico State Historical Society and, when the land was later purchased by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters, it was rehabbed into a part of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. Specifically, it was the building used to house the members of the residential writer’s program and its presence, at the edge of town, made it the first structure the investigating officers encountered on their way in.

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photo #1:

The structure is longer than it is wide, owing to the relatively narrow slice of land on which the town is built, two stories of clapboard siding painted a slaty blue-gray under a steeply pitched shingled roof, studded with windows flanked in functional shutters, an unenclosed patio/porch extending nearly to the street in front. A sign bolted to the facade over the front door identifies it as the Starry Desert Center Writer’s Residence; a plaque next to the door identifies it as a building on the State Register of Historic Places. The door itself hangs open on one twisted hinge barely clinging to the splintered wood of the frame.

Crime Scene Photos #2, 3, 4, 5 - 13:

The interior of the Writer’s Residence, ground floor. A steep staircase stands just inside the front door, leading to the second floor. To the left of the staircase lies the parlor: a collection of mismatched furniture (a sectional couch, a smaller semi-matching loveseat, a selection of chairs, a coffee table) sits in a rough circle. No holotank or sound system but a high capacity ceramic space heater designed to resemble a 19th century cast iron wood stove occupies the far corner. The signs of a struggle are obvious: an area rug covering the hardwood floor is rucked up; the coffee table lies on its side, glass top smashed, fragments scattered around it; something dark stains both the rug and the floor and more than a few pieces of glass.

To the right lies the dining room, a single long table surrounded by a dozen chairs, one of which, at the far end near the entrance to the kitchen, sits askew from its place. A glass-fronted hutch sits at the far end of the room, containing the residency’s good China, one door marked by a smeared, dark handprint.

In the kitchen, the back door stands open into the breezeway linking it to the fenced-off herb/vegetable garden occupying the next plot over. Pots hang over the prep island, undisturbed, and all of the cabinets are closed. A single piece of cutlery is missing from the knife block sitting on the prep island.

Bedrooms line the second floor hallway, most of them in states of profound disarray, as though the occupants were woken abruptly. At least one was partially barricaded from the inside. The attic lofts, containing quiet study space, appear untouched.

[End Sidebar]

“The initial 911 contact indicated that the caller saw a body lying in the street.” Copies of the crime scene photos taken in the days after that night are spread out on the patio table between us -- we have adjourned outside to enjoy the fine weather as the day fades into evening and the view of the aspen-clad mountains, already beginning their autumnward turn. “We didn’t find a body -- a splotch of blood where a body might have been, and drag marks that led right to the edge of the escarpment, but no body. In fact, we didn’t find any bodies of any kind until we got into the basement of the Center’s admin building, down in the storage rooms.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photo #14, 15:

A dark pool in the middle of the road, stretched into several smaller, splotchier pools amid obvious drag marks that terminate at the south rim of the escarpment.

The photographer must have leaned uncomfortably far out over the side to get a shot of the canyon floor at the base of the escarpment, a mass of loose scree and brush, also containing no body or bodies.

End Sidebar]

Most of the Center’s larger buildings -- the writers’ and artists’ residences, the main administrative building, the gallery display space, the shell of what was intended to be a small performance theater, still under construction at the time of the incident, were built hard against the canyon wall. The building that housed studio space for artists and sculptors, the kiln house, the materials storage outbuildings, were constructed closer to the escarpment rim, inside a waist-high guard rail fence further reinforced with decorative iron rods strung with hurricane webbing. Nobody wanted anyone to accidentally stroll off the side.

“By the time we reached the first of the production buildings, another couple black-and-whites and a few more Staties had arrived, so I felt a little more comfortable splitting the group into search parties.” Mr. Flores chuckles and shakes his head. “I...really can’t explain in words how eerie the whole scenario was -- that night was surreal in a way I’ve never experienced, before or since. The wind was howling down the canyon like a living thing -- and not any living thing, a living thing with fangs and claws that hated us all and wanted us to die. Some of the guys swore up and down that night and for days after that they heard voices in it.”

“Did you?” I feel compelled to ask, as I leaf through his personal casefile on the incident -- he’s got more pictures than are available even through FOIA requests, and he will later graciously copy them for me.

“Not...really.” He pauses, takes a sip of his tea, refuses to meet my eyes. “I heard something...but I wouldn’t call it a voice. Not words, at any rate. I split the group into two teams, one under my command, the other under Major Hathaway, and we proceeded deeper into town.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #16 - 20:

The building containing the art studio space is a two-story structure built in a roughly crescent shape along the widest part of the escarpment rim -- a blocky central building containing a foyer scattered with a mismatched assortment of chairs and a lumpy ancient futon, a unisex bathroom setup, and two projecting wings containing studios for traditional media art, digital art, photography, textile art, and sculpture. Most of the studio spaces have enormous windows overlooking the canyon itself.

The glass-fronted door of the studio space is smashed and the door itself hanging open. Traces of blood adhere to the door and create a path up the stairs to one of the sculpture studios on the second floor. The window of that studio is broken from the inside -- glass fell into the narrow strip of land behind the studio and between the safety fence. The break itself is small, as though something were flung through the window with great force.

The blood trail ends completely in the upstairs sculpture studio.

[End Sidebar]

“Major Hathaway’s group took the escarpment side of the town and then circled around the far end toward the spot where they were building the theater. Most of what they found was concentrated in the arts studio -- none of the storage outbuildings were touched, they were all padlocked shut, until they came to the new construction.” He slides a photograph across to me, one I had heard referenced by my contacts among the State and local police forces, but which I have never seen until now. “And that was some weird shit, let me tell you.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #21 - 28:

Multiple views of the semi-complete outdoor theater/amphitheater. What would have been the stage is no more than a skeletal hint of a structure but the seating is more or less complete: low-backed wooden benches sitting on top of elaborately carved sandstone supports in two concentric semi-circles, four rows each, with an aisle between them.

At the end of the aisle, in front of what would have been the stage, is the remains of a large firepit dug several inches into the underlying stone, ringed in more stones, containing the remains of a large bonfire. The stones ringing the firepit are likewise elaborately carved in a style distinctly different from the bench supports: they are jagged, appear to be broken from several larger stones, and are covered in petroglyphs: perfectly executed circles lined inside with triangular forms, inward-turning spirals, concentric bullseye figures surrounded in a dozen smaller circles around the outer edge. Some of them are splashed with a dark semi-liquid substance.

The two rows of benches closest to the fire are covered in upholstered throw cushions and a few throw blankets here and there. Discarded clothing is scattered between them. Half-hidden beneath someone’s sports bra and semi-buried in the sand is a knife, its hilt carved from horn of some sort partially wrapped in leather, its blade roughly leaf-shaped and made of carefully shaped obsidian.

[End Sidebar]

“There were rumors, of course -- had been for years. You can’t put a bunch of artsy-fartsy types out in the middle of nowhere, have minimal interaction with the outside world, and not have rumors. And where there’s rumors, there’s complaints.” Mr. Flores hands over a sheaf of papers: noise complaints, public disturbance complaints, the basic legal nuisances used to make nontraditional communities miserable when there’s no other way to do it. “We investigated, of course, but the Center was, for a pack of allegedly immoral bohemian libertines, pretty hard on the straight and narrow. Minors were not allowed to apply for residency even if they would be legal adults before the residency started. Minimum age of participation in any program was twenty-one. Zero tolerance policy for drug or alcohol abuse or for sexual harassment. Which isn’t to say that they were perfectly squeaky clean. We got called a couple times from inside for domestic disturbances, because they allowed couples to apply together, and residents to bring plus ones if they could pony up for it, and even the best couples sometimes don’t stay that way. But nothing like this.” He shakes his head. “Nothing even close. Certainly nothing to indicate that they directors were actually running a cult.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #29 - 40:

The interior of the artists’ residency in a now-familiar state of disarray: evidence of attempts by the residents to secure themselves in their rooms, apparently to no avail, indicators of a struggle in some instances, including blood spatter on the walls, on the floor, in one case across the ceiling.

Inside the central administration building, the destruction is even more significant. The shelves in the community lending library are reduced to kindling, the books themselves to little more than empty covers lost amid snowdrifts of shredded pages. The main office has been completely destroyed: metal desks twisted apart, their fragments embedded in the walls and the floor. Not a single computer or other piece of technology escapes destruction.

The downstairs storage rooms, where the community stored years of hardcopy records in filing boxes and cabinets, are strangely untouched, though all the doors have been torn off their hinges.

At the far end of the corridor stands one intact door: solid wood, carved with a sequence of glyphs similar to those on the stones outside around the firepit. A second and thematically distinct set of carvings adorns the frame. Inside the room stands a single object: a cage consisting of heavy forged iron bars sunk into eight inch thick wooden railroad ties, slightly more than six feet long and three feet wide, containing a thin pallet, a pillow, and a blanket. All three items are bloody and a pool of the same spreads out from beneath the cage.

The bars of the cage are meticulously carved with glyphs identical to those on the door and the doorframe, as are the railroad ties. Two sets of iron manacles, one attached to the head of the cage by a heavy length of chain, the other to the foot, are similarly marked though in the case of both it seems as though the manacles and the chain were cast in that design. The door of the cage is secured with a heavy padlock of similar manufacture.

The walls, the floor, and even the ceiling are covered in concentric lines of the same visual script, some images repeating from the door to the cage to the rocks around the firepit, some completely different.

In the far corner of the room, the only example of actual human remains recovered in Deadlock Gorge that night: a human hand, roughly severed just above the wrist, ragged ends of bone clearly visible. Nearby lies a second obsidian knife, its blade and handle bloodstained.

[End Sidebar]

“We found the kid downstairs -- we might not have found him at all, but one of the officers in my search group thought she saw something moving at the head of the stairs that led down to the storage area.” Mr. Flores pours himself another glass of iced, drinks, stares out into the deepening twilight for several minutes. “He...was not in a good way -- it was lucky Hathaway had her lockpicking tool on her, because otherwise we’d never have gotten those manacles open. I don’t think Forensics ever actually found the key to the damn things. We had to jimmy all the locks just to get him out and there wasn’t much he could do to help, hurt as he was. The EMTs told me he was lucky to be alive -- one of the stab wounds nicked the abdominal aorta and he was in the process of bleeding to death internally when we found him. The blood on the knife we found was his. The hand belonged to Val Kalloway, the Center’s director of operations, according to the fingerprints.” A humorless smile. “We never did find anyone else.”

In fact, none of the experts brought in to examine Deadlock Gorge after that night found anything else. In the days and weeks that followed, law enforcement officials from Federal, State, and local agencies combed every inch of the town and the canyon beyond for any trace of the missing inhabitants of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. There were four writers plus the program director on site for the September through December residency term; there were six artists plus the art residency director. The Director of Operations and six members of the permanent instruction staff plus two administrative personnel lived in a smaller residence behind the main administration building.

Twenty-one people disappeared without a trace that night. Cadaver-sniffing dogs found no evidence of hidden human remains, either in the town or in the canyon. The forensic scientists who processed the scene found copious evidence of habitation by the the people who were supposed to be there but no evidence whatsoever of any invaders, intruders, or involvement by outside individuals. The lone survivor -- a juvenile male listed as John Doe in the official documentation of the incident -- was transported via ambulance to the University Hospital. It is my understanding that he survived, despite the severity of his injuries and his overall condition, which was something other than ideal, and that he gave an official statement to the authorities. Both that statement, and the documents confirming his identity, are sealed by Federal district court order and have never been released to the public. A FOIA request I made in regard to this issue was summarily rejected.

Mr. Flores gifted me a copy of his entire casefile on the incident -- the so-called “Massacre In Deadlock Gorge” -- before I left that night and wished me luck.

“Of all the unsolved cases I’ve had in my time -- and there have been a couple -- that’s the one that’s caused me the most sleepless nights over the years.” He admitted as he walked me to my car. “Because if it could happen there, who’s to say it couldn’t happen somewhere else? Lots of small places where small numbers of people live now, after the Crisis, and we don’t even have official eyes on them all. Someday, it’s going to happen again.”

*

[solivar]

WIP: Massacre In Deadlock Gorge

An investigative report by Olivia Colomar of Paranormal New Mexico.

Deadlock Gorge.

It’s a name that catches the imagination almost immediately, harkening back as it does to the days of the Wild West, of handsome cowboys and grizzled old prospectors, wagon trains full of tenderfoot settlers, Pony Express riders and stagecoaches and the black-hatted outlaws who robbed them all. That is, of course, not its only name -- only the most recent, and likely the most famous, for a variety of reasons.

The Ancestral Puebloans left ruins there, as they did in so many other high-walled canyons in the Four Corners, but even now their descendants do not give it a name. In fact, my regular Puebloan cultural experts flatly refused to speak with me about the place at all. The Spanish settlers who made their homes around Albuquerque called it El Cañon del Viento Cortante, the Canyon of the Biting Wind, though its position tends to rather nomadic on antique maps of the region housed in the University of New Mexico Anthropology Department’s library. The Navajo bands who were its closest neighbors simply called it the Hungry Place and shunned it with astonishing enthusiasm given the presence of readily available water, arable land at its widest point, and the shelter to be found within its network of water-carved sandstone caves. Today it lies entirely inside the boundaries of the expanded Navajo Reservation Annex and is only desultorily patrolled by Reservation police. It came by its present name, of course, thanks to the infamous Deadlock Gang, who used it as their base of operations as they marauded across Native communities and Anglo settlements, prospecting outfits and isolated ranches, before the final bloody confrontation within the canyon’s walls brought an end to their reign of terror.

In fact, Deadlock Gorge appears to have had a rather significant history of violence, stretching back as far into history as I’ve been able to research and very much extending to the present day. It was, as of this writing, only ten years ago that the art colony established there by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters came to a grisly and, to date, unexplained end.

*

It was just after midnight on October 29th when the call came in to McKinley County 911. Veteran operator Melissa Rosales received that first frantic call for help.

Melissa Rosales is a petite woman who wears her graying brown hair in an asymetrical style that flatters her pixieish face. Her eyes are framed in crow’s feet and the years have gifted her with a generous portion of laugh lines. She is smiling as we sit down together at Cafe Pasqual to talk once she’s done her shift. She still works at the county 911 office, as a supervisor, and she says that, over the years, she has received many calls that have stayed with her: the young family caught in their vehicle in the midst of rising flood waters during a freakishly powerful storm, the two year old bitten by a rattlesnake in her family’s garden, more than one car accident involving drunken college students and long haul transport rigs on the interstate. None of them haunt her like the frantic cries that came from Deadlock Gorge that night in October ten years ago.

“It was almost Halloween, and it was a full moon -- that whole week was crazy, weird calls every day. The night before, someone called to report a chupacabra raiding their compost bin. Can you believe it?” Melissa laughs, shaking her head, but the humor doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It isn’t always like that on the full moon but that month, it surely was. When the first calls came in, Ms. Colomar, I freely confess that we didn’t know what to believe.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #1 12:07 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Unidentified Woman:

Help...please help…

911 Operator:

We will certainly do so, ma’am, but I need you to tell me where you are.

Unidentified Woman:

Deadlock...We’re...We’re in Deadlock Gorge, just off 66, the Starry Desert Center For the Arts -- [static] -- ter’s residency at the edge of town. Something --

911 Operator:

Ma’am, could you please tell me the nature of the emergency? Do you need fire and rescue services? Emergency medical services? Police?

Unidentified Woman:

I -- I -- I don’t know I don’t know. I’m at the window, the front window of the writer’s residency parlor and and I see...someone’s lying in the street. They’re not moving, they’re not moving, I think they might be dead, the street lights are out I can’t -- [static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am can you hear me? [pause] Ma’am?

Unidentified Woman:

[whispering] I hear something right outside. I can hear it breathing. I think it can hear me, too. Oh God I think it can hear me too.

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

“There are all sorts of weird stories about the Gorge -- I sure you’ve heard more than a few of them.” Melissa fiddles with her necklace as she speaks, a delicate silver chain hung with turquoise beads, a strangely nervous gesture for a woman who otherwise comes across as bedrock settled, coolly calm and collected. “That it’s haunted, that it’s cursed, you know how it is. I was half convinced, given how close it was to Halloween, that it could be some kind of stupid prank, college kids with nothing better to do. Then the second call came in.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #2 12:12 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Anita Colomar (Writer’s Residency Director at Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences):

Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences, 66 Canyon Drive, in Deadlock Gorge. Please send police and emergency medical services.

911 Operator:

Ma’am, can you tell me the nature of the emergency?

Anita Colomar:

I’m...not entirely certain myself. Power is out in the gorge -- I heard an...I don’t want to say an explosion but...it could have been. It was loud -- loud enough to wake me and several of the residents out of a sound sleep and --

[A high-pitched sound cuts across the recording, followed by several seconds of intense static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?

Anita Colomar:

Yes -- yes, I can hear you. Did you hear that?

911 Operator:

Yes, I did. That was at your end?

Anita Colomar:

It was. I think -- was that coming from outside? Candace, can you see?

[Inaudibly muffled voices from off the line, a sequence of loud bangs, a short scream that terminates abruptly]

Jeff, Candy, push my dresser in front of the door. Hurry. Officer, I think someone may be inside the residency building --

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

I suppose I should confess, at this point, that my interest in the incident that took place at the Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences -- the so-called Massacre In Deadlock Gorge -- is not entirely one of a neutral observer. My aunt, my father’s younger sister, Anita Colomar, was the director of the writer’s residency at the time and one of the few people to have verifiable contact with emergency services on the night of the incident itself. In fact, the woman sitting across from me was, in all likelihood, one of the last people to ever speak to her.

“I dispatched police as soon as the first call came in.” Melissa says, her tone quiet and apologetic, as though she has something to apologize for. “When the second came in, I also dispatched emergency services. And after that, well…”

My FOIA request to the McKinley County 911 dispatch office for calls related to the incident in Deadlock Gorge yielded eighty-seven individual call records and associated transcripts concentrated in a single twenty-five minute period between 12:07 am and 12:32 am. Most of the calls are no more than a few seconds long and consist almost entirely of static, snatches of loud noises, and incoherent voices. Cellular contact with the Gorge failed entirely by no later than 12:33 am. The first law enforcement responders arrived at the edge of the canyon three minutes later. The motivators and antigrav units in their vehicles failed as they crossed beneath the sandstone arch that marks the entrance to the town proper, forcing them to approach the cluster of darkened structures clinging to the mid-canyon escarpment on foot. What they found once they arrived exceeded the expectations of even the most experienced officers but not those of the dispatchers, whose lines had by then fallen eerily silent.

“I’m sorry that we couldn’t do more that night, though to this day I’m not sure if there was more to do.” Melissa tells me as we step outside into the warm summer evening, ten years removed from the cold and dark of that night. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

*

Deadlock Gorge first enters the “modern” historical record in documents dating from the early 1700s, copies of reports written to and by the assorted Spanish colonial governors of Villa de Alburquerque, as the city was known at that time, a strategic military outpost along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. It was this military significance, and resultant presence of a fairly hefty armed garrison, that led the rancheros living west of the city -- in what is today McKinley County -- to repeatedly beg the assistance of their governor when it came to keeping marauders out of their flocks. The ranchers mostly raised sheep (for their wool -- early Albuquerque was a major center for the New World textiles trade) and goats (for their meat and milk) and in the autumn of 1711, something was taking a sizeable chunk out of that trade, whole flocks, and whole shepherds, going missing. Evidence suggested that the missing livestock and farmers were disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, into El Cañon del Viento Cortante, a deep, twisting canyon of red sandstone walls, one end of which formed a natural border between several different ranching concerns.

The wealthy Spanish landowners were losing money hand over fist, they were having trouble retaining trustworthy workers, and they insisted, in a flurry of letters growing gradually shriller as the year wore on, that the governor had to send troops to help rout out the source of their trouble. Frankly, they suspected marauding natives clever enough to cover up the evidence of the depredations. Finally aggravated beyond endurance by all the whining, from sheep ranchers and wool merchants alike, a detachment of soldiers under an experienced native-fighting commander was sent to investigate the situation in El Cañon del Viento Cortante, kill whatever needed to be killed, soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, and return with proof that the matter was handled.

The detachment never returned.

In fact, nothing of them was ever seen or heard from again. No remains were ever found. No indications of battle -- pitched or otherwise -- were found. No evidence of ambush, either. The local Native bands who came to trade in Albuquerque disclaimed any knowledge of the thefts or the fate of the Spanish soldiers but issued an unusually blunt warning: El Cañon del Viento Cortante was not a good place, was not a safe place, and that was why no member of any band not insane, desperate, or outcast chose to make a home there. It would be best if the Spaniards left it alone, as well.

The governor of Albuquerque quietly arranged for the ranchers to be compensated for their losses and urged them to abandon the territory immediately surrounding El Cañon del Viento Cortante. Fragmentary records exist to suggest this may have happened -- or that the ranchers, like their unfortunate herds, employees, and soldiers, also vanished into the hungry maw of the canyon.

*

[solivar]

WIP: Massacre In Deadlock Gorge

An investigative report by Olivia Colomar of Paranormal New Mexico.

Deadlock Gorge.

It’s a name that catches the imagination almost immediately, harkening back as it does to the days of the Wild West, of handsome cowboys and grizzled old prospectors, wagon trains full of tenderfoot settlers, Pony Express riders and stagecoaches and the black-hatted outlaws who robbed them all. That is, of course, not its only name -- only the most recent, and likely the most famous, for a variety of reasons.

The Ancestral Puebloans left ruins there, as they did in so many other high-walled canyons in the Four Corners, but even now their descendants do not give it a name. In fact, my regular Puebloan cultural experts flatly refused to speak with me about the place at all. The Spanish settlers who made their homes around Albuquerque called it El Cañon del Viento Cortante, the Canyon of the Biting Wind, though its position tends to be rather nomadic on antique maps of the region housed in the University of New Mexico Anthropology Department’s library. The Navajo bands who were its closest neighbors simply called it the Hungry Place and shunned it with astonishing enthusiasm given the presence of readily available water, arable land at its widest point, and the shelter to be found within its network of water-carved sandstone caves. Today it lies entirely inside the boundaries of the expanded Navajo Reservation Annex and is only desultorily patrolled by Reservation police. It came by its present name, of course, thanks to the infamous Deadlock Gang, who used it as their base of operations as they marauded across Native communities and Anglo settlements, prospecting outfits and isolated ranches, before the final bloody confrontation within the canyon’s walls brought an end to their reign of terror.

In fact, Deadlock Gorge appears to have had a rather significant history of violence, stretching back as far into history as I’ve been able to research and very much extending to the present day. It was, as of this writing, only ten years ago that the art colony established there by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters came to a grisly and, to date, unexplained end.

*

It was just after midnight on October 29th when the call came in to McKinley County 911. Veteran operator Melissa Rosales received that first frantic call for help.

Melissa Rosales is a petite woman who wears her graying brown hair in an asymetrical style that flatters her pixieish face. Her eyes are framed in crow’s feet and the years have gifted her with a generous portion of laugh lines. She is smiling as we sit down together at Cafe Pasqual to talk once she’s done her shift. She still works at the county 911 office, as a supervisor, and she says that, over the years, she has received many calls that have stayed with her: the young family caught in their vehicle in the midst of rising flood waters during a freakishly powerful storm, the two year old bitten by a rattlesnake in her family’s garden, more than one car accident involving drunken college students and long haul transport rigs on the interstate. None of them haunt her like the frantic cries that came from Deadlock Gorge that night in October ten years ago.

“It was almost Halloween, and it was a full moon -- that whole week was crazy, weird calls every day. The night before, someone called to report a chupacabra raiding their compost bin. Can you believe it?” Melissa laughs, shaking her head, but the humor doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “It isn’t always like that on the full moon but that month, it surely was. When the first calls came in, Ms. Colomar, I freely confess that we didn’t know what to believe.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #1 12:07 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Unidentified Woman:

Help...please help…

911 Operator:

We will certainly do so, ma’am, but I need you to tell me where you are.

Unidentified Woman:

Deadlock...We’re...We’re in Deadlock Gorge, just off 66, the Starry Desert Center For the Arts -- [static] -- ter’s residency at the edge of town. Something --

911 Operator:

Ma’am, could you please tell me the nature of the emergency? Do you need fire and rescue services? Emergency medical services? Police?

Unidentified Woman:

I -- I -- I don’t know I don’t know. I’m at the window, the front window of the writer’s residency parlor and and I see...someone’s lying in the street. They’re not moving, they’re not moving, I think they might be dead, the street lights are out I can’t -- [static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am can you hear me? [pause] Ma’am?

Unidentified Woman:

[whispering] I hear something right outside. I can hear it breathing. I think it can hear me, too. Oh God I think it can hear me too.

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

“There are all sorts of weird stories about the Gorge -- I sure you’ve heard more than a few of them.” Melissa fiddles with her necklace as she speaks, a delicate silver chain hung with turquoise beads, a strangely nervous gesture for a woman who otherwise comes across as bedrock settled, coolly calm and collected. “That it’s haunted, that it’s cursed, you know how it is. I was half convinced, given how close it was to Halloween, that it could be some kind of stupid prank, college kids with nothing better to do. Then the second call came in.”

[Begin Transcript:

911 Call #2 12:12 AM

911 Operator:

911, where is the emergency?

Anita Colomar (Writer’s Residency Director at Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences):

Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences, 66 Canyon Drive, in Deadlock Gorge. Please send police and emergency medical services.

911 Operator:

Ma’am, can you tell me the nature of the emergency?

Anita Colomar:

I’m...not entirely certain myself. Power is out in the gorge -- I heard an...I don’t want to say an explosion but...it could have been. It was loud -- loud enough to wake me and several of the residents out of a sound sleep and --

[A high-pitched sound cuts across the recording, followed by several seconds of intense static]

911 Operator:

Ma’am? Ma’am, can you hear me?

Anita Colomar:

Yes -- yes, I can hear you. Did you hear that?

911 Operator:

Yes, I did. That was at your end?

Anita Colomar:

It was. I think -- was that coming from outside? Candace, can you see?

[Inaudibly muffled voices from off the line, a sequence of loud bangs, a short scream that terminates abruptly]

Jeff, Candy, push my dresser in front of the door. Hurry. Officer, I think someone may be inside the residency building --

Recording Ends

[End Transcript]

I suppose I should confess, at this point, that my interest in the incident that took place at the Starry Desert Center For the Arts and Sciences -- the so-called Massacre In Deadlock Gorge -- is not entirely one of a neutral observer. My aunt, my father’s younger sister, Anita Colomar, was the director of the writer’s residency at the time and one of the few people to have verifiable contact with emergency services on the night of the incident itself. In fact, the woman sitting across from me was, in all likelihood, one of the last people to ever speak to her.

“I dispatched police as soon as the first call came in.” Melissa says, her tone quiet and apologetic, as though she has something to apologize for. “When the second came in, I also dispatched emergency services. And after that, well…”

My FOIA request to the McKinley County 911 dispatch office for calls related to the incident in Deadlock Gorge yielded eighty-seven individual call records and associated transcripts concentrated in a single twenty-five minute period between 12:07 am and 12:32 am. Most of the calls are no more than a few seconds long and consist almost entirely of static, snatches of loud noises, and incoherent voices. Cellular contact with the Gorge failed entirely by no later than 12:33 am. The first law enforcement responders arrived at the edge of the canyon three minutes later. The motivators and antigrav units in their vehicles failed as they crossed beneath the sandstone arch that marks the entrance to the town proper, forcing them to approach the cluster of darkened structures clinging to the mid-canyon escarpment on foot. What they found once they arrived exceeded the expectations of even the most experienced officers but not those of the dispatchers, whose lines had by then fallen eerily silent.

“I’m sorry that we couldn’t do more that night, though to this day I’m not sure if there was more to do.” Melissa tells me as we step outside into the warm summer evening, ten years removed from the cold and dark of that night. “And I’m sorry for your loss.”

*

Deadlock Gorge first enters the “modern” historical record in documents dating from the early 1700s, copies of reports written to and by the assorted Spanish colonial governors of Villa de Alburquerque, as the city was known at that time, a strategic military outpost along the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro. It was this military significance, and resultant presence of a fairly hefty armed garrison, that led the rancheros living west of the city -- in what is today McKinley County -- to repeatedly beg the assistance of their governor when it came to keeping marauders out of their flocks. The ranchers mostly raised sheep (for their wool -- early Albuquerque was a major center for the New World textiles trade) and goats (for their meat and milk) and in the autumn of 1711, something was taking a sizeable chunk out of that trade, whole flocks, and whole shepherds, going missing. Evidence suggested that the missing livestock and farmers were disappearing, voluntarily or otherwise, into El Cañon del Viento Cortante, a deep, twisting canyon of red sandstone walls, one end of which formed a natural border between several different ranching concerns.

The wealthy Spanish landowners were losing money hand over fist, they were having trouble retaining trustworthy workers, and they insisted, in a flurry of letters growing gradually shriller as the year wore on, that the governor had to send troops to help rout out the source of their trouble. Frankly, they suspected marauding natives clever enough to cover up the evidence of the depredations. Finally aggravated beyond endurance by all the whining, from sheep ranchers and wool merchants alike, a detachment of soldiers under an experienced native-fighting commander was sent to investigate the situation in El Cañon del Viento Cortante, kill whatever needed to be killed, soothe the ruffled feathers of the locals, and return with proof that the matter was handled.

The detachment never returned.

In fact, nothing of them was ever seen or heard from again. No remains were ever found. No indications of battle -- pitched or otherwise -- were found. No evidence of ambush, either. The local Native bands who came to trade in Albuquerque disclaimed any knowledge of the thefts or the fate of the Spanish soldiers but issued an unusually blunt warning: El Cañon del Viento Cortante was not a good place, was not a safe place, and that was why no member of any band not insane, desperate, or outcast chose to make a home there. It would be best if the Spaniards left it alone, as well.

The governor of Albuquerque quietly arranged for the ranchers to be compensated for their losses and urged them to abandon the territory immediately surrounding El Cañon del Viento Cortante. Fragmentary records exist to suggest this may have happened -- or that the ranchers, like their unfortunate herds, employees, and soldiers, also vanished into the hungry maw of the canyon.

*

Sergeant Andrew Flores of the New Mexico State Police was the first police responder to reach Deadlock Gorge on the night of the incident, followed closely by three black-and-white cruisers rerouted from patrols in nearby communities. He organized the group and led them into town on foot after all their vehicles failed, more or less simultaneously. He recounts the way the night unfolded to me as we sit together in the living room of his trim little cabin outside Chimayó, drinking iced tea and eating a meal he has prepared using the vegetables grown in his own garden. He retired from the State Police three years ago and settled down in this vibrant little town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, to write his memoirs and to raise heirloom produce for sale in the local farmer’s market. He does, in fact, have plenty to write about but, even so, the incident in Deadlock Gorge stands out in his memory as the strangest of many strange experiences.

“It’s a cliche but I guess that’s for a reason,” Former Officer Flores laughs, shaking his head slightly. “‘Twas a dark and stormy night,’ you know? The moon was full -- I recall that vividly -- but it hardly mattered because heavy weather was rolling in from the north and the moon was playing hide and seek with the clouds. One minute it was almost as bright as noon, shining off the canyon walls and the streets and the buildings, and the next it was as dark as the bottom of a well, no lights anywhere except ours, not even battery powered emergency lights.”

The town of Deadlock Gorge is built atop a midlevel escarpment a couple hundred feet down from the rim of the canyon at its extreme northern and narrowest end, straddling a relatively short and dangerously curvy stretch of Historic Route 66 that exits the canyon headed west, into Arizona. That particular stretch of HR 66 was, at one point, a shepherd’s trail, used to usher flocks of sheep and goats between one pasturage and another, and then a wagon trail, used by settlers traveling west, hopefully to California. The original town sprung up to tend to the needs of weary travelers and consisted of a boarding house, a saloon, a dry goods store, a livery stable, and a blacksmith. Of those original buildings, only the boarding house survived the raid that put an end to the Deadlock Gang -- survived it in good enough condition that efforts were made to preserve it by the New Mexico State Historical Society and, when the land was later purchased by the Santa Fe Society of Arts and Letters, it was rehabbed into a part of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. Specifically, it was the building used to house the members of the residential writer’s program and its presence, at the edge of town, made it the first structure the investigating officers encountered on their way in.

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photo #1:

The structure is longer than it is wide, owing to the relatively narrow slice of land on which the town is built, two stories of clapboard siding painted a slaty blue-gray under a steeply pitched shingled roof, studded with windows flanked in functional shutters, an unenclosed patio/porch extending nearly to the street in front. A sign bolted to the facade over the front door identifies it as the Starry Desert Center Writer’s Residence; a plaque next to the door identifies it as a building on the State Register of Historic Places. The door itself hangs open on one twisted hinge barely clinging to the splintered wood of the frame.

Crime Scene Photos #2, 3, 4, 5 - 13:

The interior of the Writer’s Residence, ground floor. A steep staircase stands just inside the front door, leading to the second floor. To the left of the staircase lies the parlor: a collection of mismatched furniture (a sectional couch, a smaller semi-matching loveseat, a selection of chairs, a coffee table) sits in a rough circle. No holotank or sound system but a high capacity ceramic space heater designed to resemble a 19th century cast iron wood stove occupies the far corner. The signs of a struggle are obvious: an area rug covering the hardwood floor is rucked up; the coffee table lies on its side, glass top smashed, fragments scattered around it; something dark stains both the rug and the floor and more than a few pieces of glass.

To the right lies the dining room, a single long table surrounded by a dozen chairs, one of which, at the far end near the entrance to the kitchen, sits askew from its place. A glass-fronted hutch sits at the far end of the room, containing the residency’s good China, one door marked by a smeared, dark handprint.

In the kitchen, the back door stands open into the breezeway linking it to the fenced-off herb/vegetable garden occupying the next plot over. Pots hang over the prep island, undisturbed, and all of the cabinets are closed. A single piece of cutlery is missing from the knife block sitting on the prep island.

Bedrooms line the second floor hallway, most of them in states of profound disarray, as though the occupants were woken abruptly. At least one was partially barricaded from the inside. The attic lofts, containing quiet study space, appear untouched.

[End Sidebar]

“The initial 911 contact indicated that the caller saw a body lying in the street.” Copies of the crime scene photos taken in the days after that night are spread out on the patio table between us -- we have adjourned outside to enjoy the fine weather as the day fades into evening and the view of the aspen-clad mountains, already beginning their autumnward turn. “We didn’t find a body -- a splotch of blood where a body might have been, and drag marks that led right to the edge of the escarpment, but no body. In fact, we didn’t find any bodies of any kind until we got into the basement of the Center’s admin building, down in the storage rooms.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photo #14, 15:

A dark pool in the middle of the road, stretched into several smaller, splotchier pools amid obvious drag marks that terminate at the south rim of the escarpment.

The photographer must have leaned uncomfortably far out over the side to get a shot of the canyon floor at the base of the escarpment, a mass of loose scree and brush, also containing no body or bodies.

End Sidebar]

Most of the Center’s larger buildings -- the writers’ and artists’ residences, the main administrative building, the gallery display space, the shell of what was intended to be a small performance theater, still under construction at the time of the incident, were built hard against the canyon wall. The building that housed studio space for artists and sculptors, the kiln house, the materials storage outbuildings, were constructed closer to the escarpment rim, inside a waist-high guard rail fence further reinforced with decorative iron rods strung with hurricane webbing. Nobody wanted anyone to accidentally stroll off the side.

“By the time we reached the first of the production buildings, another couple black-and-whites and a few more Staties had arrived, so I felt a little more comfortable splitting the group into search parties.” Mr. Flores chuckles and shakes his head. “I...really can’t explain in words how eerie the whole scenario was -- that night was surreal in a way I’ve never experienced, before or since. The wind was howling down the canyon like a living thing -- and not any living thing, a living thing with fangs and claws that hated us all and wanted us to die. Some of the guys swore up and down that night and for days after that they heard voices in it.”

“Did you?” I feel compelled to ask, as I leaf through his personal casefile on the incident -- he’s got more pictures than are available even through FOIA requests, and he will later graciously copy them for me.

“Not...really.” He pauses, takes a sip of his tea, refuses to meet my eyes. “I heard something...but I wouldn’t call it a voice. Not words, at any rate. I split the group into two teams, one under my command, the other under Major Hathaway, and we proceeded deeper into town.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #16 - 20

The building containing the art studio space is a two-story structure built in a roughly crescent shape along the widest part of the escarpment rim -- a blocky central building containing a foyer scattered with a mismatched assortment of chairs and a lumpy ancient futon, a unisex bathroom setup, and two projecting wings containing studios for traditional media art, digital art, photography, textile art, and sculpture. Most of the studio spaces have enormous windows overlooking the canyon itself.

The glass-fronted door of the studio space is smashed and the door itself hanging open. Traces of blood adhere to the door and create a path up the stairs to one of the sculpture studios on the second floor. The window of that studio is broken from the inside -- glass fell into the narrow strip of land behind the studio and between the safety fence. The break itself is small, as though something were flung through the window with great force.

The blood trail ends completely in the upstairs sculpture studio.

[End Sidebar]

“Major Hathaway’s group took the escarpment side of the town and then circled around the far end toward the spot where they were building the theater. Most of what they found was concentrated in the arts studio -- none of the storage outbuildings were touched, they were all padlocked shut, until they came to the new construction.” He slides a photograph across to me, one I had heard referenced by my contacts among the State and local police forces, but which I have never seen until now. “And that was some weird shit, let me tell you.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #21 - 28:

Multiple views of the semi-complete outdoor theater/amphitheater. What would have been the stage is no more than a skeletal hint of a structure but the seating is more or less complete: low-backed wooden benches sitting on top of elaborately carved sandstone supports in two concentric semi-circles, four rows each, with an aisle between them.

At the end of the aisle, in front of what would have been the stage, is the remains of a large firepit dug several inches into the underlying stone, ringed in more stones, containing the remains of a large bonfire. The stones ringing the firepit are likewise elaborately carved in a style distinctly different from the bench supports: they are jagged, appear to be broken from several larger stones, and are covered in petroglyphs: perfectly executed circles lined inside with triangular forms, inward-turning spirals, concentric bullseye figures surrounded in a dozen smaller circles around the outer edge. Some of them are splashed with a dark semi-liquid substance.

The two rows of benches closest to the fire are covered in upholstered throw cushions and a few throw blankets here and there. Discarded clothing is scattered between them. Half-hidden beneath someone’s sports bra and semi-buried in the sand is a knife, its hilt carved from horn of some sort partially wrapped in leather, its blade roughly leaf-shaped and made of carefully shaped obsidian.

[End Sidebar]

“There were rumors, of course -- had been for years. You can’t put a bunch of artsy-fartsy types out in the middle of nowhere, have minimal interaction with the outside world, and not have rumors. And where there’s rumors, there’s complaints.” Mr. Flores hands over a sheaf of papers: noise complaints, public disturbance complaints, the basic legal nuisances used to make nontraditional communities miserable when there’s no other way to do it. “We investigated, of course, but the Center was, for a pack of allegedly immoral bohemian libertines, pretty hard on the straight and narrow. Minors were not allowed to apply for residency even if they would be legal adults before the residency started. Minimum age of participation in any program was twenty-one. Zero tolerance policy for drug or alcohol abuse or for sexual harassment. Which isn’t to say that they were perfectly squeaky clean. We got called a couple times from inside for domestic disturbances, because they allowed couples to apply together, and residents to bring plus ones if they could pony up for it, and even the best couples sometimes don’t stay that way. But nothing like this.” He shakes his head. “Nothing even close. Certainly nothing to indicate that they directors were actually running a cult.”

[Begin Sidebar:

Crime Scene Photos #29 - 40:

The interior of the artists’ residency in a now-familiar state of disarray: evidence of attempts by the residents to secure themselves in their rooms, apparently to no avail, indicators of a struggle in some instances, including blood spatter on the walls, on the floor, in one case across the ceiling.

Inside the central administration building, the destruction is even more significant. The shelves in the community lending library are reduced to kindling, the books themselves to little more than empty covers lost amid snowdrifts of shredded pages. The main office has been completely destroyed: metal desks twisted apart, their fragments embedded in the walls and the floor. Not a single computer or other piece of technology escapes destruction.

The downstairs storage rooms, where the community stored years of hardcopy records in filing boxes and cabinets, are strangely untouched, though all the doors have been torn off their hinges.

At the far end of the corridor stands one intact door: solid wood, carved with a sequence of glyphs similar to those on the stones outside around the firepit. A second and thematically distinct set of carvings adorns the frame. Inside the room stands a single object: a cage consisting of heavy forged iron bars sunk into eight inch thick wooden railroad ties, slightly more than six feet long and three feet wide, containing a thin pallet, a pillow, and a blanket. All three items are bloody and a pool of the same spreads out from beneath the cage.

The bars of the cage are meticulously carved with glyphs identical to those on the door and the doorframe, as are the railroad ties. Two sets of iron manacles, one attached to the head of the cage by a heavy length of chain, the other to the foot, are similarly marked though in the case of both it seems as though the manacles and the chain were cast in that design. The door of the cage is secured with a heavy padlock of similar manufacture.

The walls, the floor, and even the ceiling are covered in concentric lines of the same visual script, some images repeating from the door to the cage to the rocks around the firepit, some completely different.

In the far corner of the room, the only example of actual human remains recovered in Deadlock Gorge that night: a human hand, roughly severed just above the wrist, ragged ends of bone clearly visible. Nearby lies a second obsidian knife, its blade and handle bloodstained.

[End Sidebar]

“We found the kid downstairs -- we might not have found him at all, but one of the officers in my search group thought she saw something moving at the head of the stairs that led down to the storage area.” Mr. Flores pours himself another glass of iced, drinks, stares out into the deepening twilight for several minutes. “He...was not in a good way -- it was lucky Hathaway had her lockpicking tool on her, because otherwise we’d never have gotten those manacles open. I don’t think Forensics ever actually found the key to the damn things. We had to jimmy all the locks just to get him out and there wasn’t much he could do to help, hurt as he was. The EMTs told me he was lucky to be alive -- one of the stab wounds knicked the abdominal aorta and he was in the process of bleeding to death internally when we found him. The blood on the knife we found was his. The hand belonged to Val Kalloway, the Center’s director of operations, according to the fingerprints.” A humorless smile. “We never did find anyone else.”

In fact, none of the experts brought in to examine Deadlock Gorge after that night found anything else. In the days and weeks that followed, law enforcement officials from Federal, State, and local agencies combed every inch of the town and the canyon beyond for any trace of the missing inhabitants of the Starry Desert Center For Arts and Sciences. There were four writers plus the program director on site for the September through December residency term; there were six artists plus the art residency director. The Director of Operations and six members of the permanent instruction staff plus two administrative personnel lived in a smaller residence behind the main administration building.

Twenty-one people disappeared without a trace that night. Cadaver-sniffing dogs found no evidence of hidden human remains, either in the town or in the canyon. The forensic scientists who processed the scene found copious evidence of habitation by the the people who were supposed to be there but no evidence whatsoever of any invaders, intruders, or involvement by outside individuals. The lone survivor -- a juvenile male listed as John Doe in the official documentation of the incident -- was transported via ambulance to the University Hospital. It is my understanding that he survived, despite the severity of his injuries and his overall condition, which was something other than ideal, and that he gave an official statement to the authorities. Both that statement, and the documents confirming his identity, are sealed by Federal district court order and have never been released to the public. A FOIA request I made in regard to this issue was summarily rejected.

Mr. Flores gifted me a copy of his entire casefile on the incident -- the so-called “Massacre In Deadlock Gorge” -- before I left that night and wished me luck.

“Of all the unsolved cases I’ve had in my time -- and there have been a couple -- that’s the one that’s caused me the most sleepless nights over the years.” He admitted as he walked me to my car. “Because if it could happen there, who’s to say it couldn’t happen somewhere else? Lots of small places where small numbers of people live now, after the Crisis, and we don’t even have official eyes on them all. Someday, it’s going to happen again.”

*

Daniel Locke was not the sort of person one would reasonably expect to find running a gang of ruthless outlaws out of a bloodsoaked canyon in the desert but, well, he did.

He was the scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family, a step below the true northeastern aristocratic clans of the day but rich enough from their own endeavors that their “lesser” social cachet hardly impeded them. His elder brother, Alexander, graduated from Harvard and served terms in both the Massachusetts State Senate and in the US House of Representatives. His younger sister, Margaret, graduated from Mount Holyoke and married well, repeatedly, further enhancing the family’s fortunes.

Daniel himself attended Dartmouth and evidently graduated with sufficient academic success that his doting parents sent him on a Grand Tour of Europe, a rite of passage beloved by the economic elite of the United States in the years leading up to the Civil War. We know, as a result of his own extensive journals on the topic -- Locke loved to write, particularly about himself -- that his Tour departed from the well-beaten path of posing for portraiture among majestic Roman ruins in Italy rather early in the proceedings. His writings on the topic are erudite and scathing, lambasting the insipidity of it all, scrabbling for meaning amid the pretty wreckage instead of seeking the true legacy of lost knowledge, sparing not even his family, “who seemed to content to profit from the scholarly endeavors of earlier, better generations,” and I quote. At the point in the standard Grand Tour itinerary where the average wealthy American would winter in Geneva, writing odes to the lake and/or the Rhone, sipping chocolate and flirting with beautiful young women (apple-cheeked Swiss milkmaid variety), Daniel Locke abandoned his traveling companions and his guide and continued on. In the last of the journals he wrote in Switzerland, entrusted to a college friend for delivery to his parents, he indicated his intent to seek a hidden school in the mountains of the uttermost (European) East.

And then he vanished.

For more than ten years.

When next he appears in the historical record, it’s on a Wanted poster in the New Mexico Territory. A relatively modest reward is offered for his capture on charges related to a stagecoach robbery on the road between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. That would, over the next handful of years, change rather rapidly: at the time of his putative death, the bounty on his head was over $15000, one of the highest in the history of the Old West, and the charges had grown to include murder and rape as well as a spectacular and brazen series of robberies. His own initial successes as an outlaw attracted to him a band of likeminded confederates and together they terrorized communities on both sides of the New Mexico-Arizona territorial border.

They were called the Deadlock Gang: Daniel “Deadeye” Locke, who claimed that his uncanny skill with a gun was a gift from the hands of the Devil himself, for which he had given his mortal soul; Black Frank O’Rourke, an Irishman who fled New York just ahead of the hangman, having murdered both his wife and her lover; Jefferson “Skinner” Delacour, an infamous former Confederate officer and fugitive slave-hunter; Sarah “Red” Reed, a young woman from a long line of cattle rustlers, horse thieves, bootleggers, and fences. Others came went but they formed the core of the group and, for four bloody years in the late 1870s to the early 1880s, they held sway over a constantly shifting court of rogues and killers from the little town in the canyon that came to be known as Deadlock Gorge. In many ways, they owed their success to the possession of that stronghold: the entrances and exits of the Gorge were natural chokepoints, easy for a relatively small group of defenders to hold, and the twisting, switchback routes along the canyon floor and through the town itself lent a significant advantage to anyone familiar with their tricks. It couldn’t last, of course: each of the gang’s members were wanted individually for crimes ranging from murder to bank robbery to forgery and, together, they represented a significant threat to law and order as well as an almost impossibly huge payday for bounty hunters.

In the end, it was a joint operation of the US Marshals, a detachment of the regular Army, and a posse of personally interested individuals, many of them the friends and kin of the Deadlock Gang’s many victims, to finally take them down. Light artillery pieces were involved. So were at least two gatling guns. There are still places along the rim of the canyon where the scars of the battle are visible to this day. By the time the shooting was over, more than half the Marshals, no small number of the soldiers, a goodly portion of the vengeful posse, and the entire Deadlock Gang lay dead. Or, at least, it was presumed that the entire Deadlock Gang was dead. Their bodies were recovered from the bullet-riddled ruins of the saloon/inn that they used as the site of their last stand, as were their personal possessions: an astonishing quantity of ill-gotten lucre, firearms, explosives, and Daniel Locke’s many, many, many journals, which he had never ceased to write and excerpts from which ultimately served to confirm his identity to his horrified family back East. All but one was buried in Fairview Cemetery in Albuquerque -- that one being Daniel Locke himself, whose body disappeared before it could be interred. The Locke family denied any involvement in the matter and, in fact, his name was formally stricken from the family lineage. They refused to take possession of any of his mortal effects, leaving his journals and his allegedly hell-forged six-gun to the authorities to dispose of as they wished. Packed away in an ironbound steamer trunk, they passed through numerous hands over the course of a century before finally landing in the possession of the University of New Mexico Sante Fe Historical Documents Archive where they were promptly deposited in the storage annex and forgotten again for nearly a second century.

They were rediscovered in the early 2050s when the Historical Document Archive began an aggressive program of content digitization for the preservation of at-risk documents. The revelation that the so-called “Deadlock Journals” still existed sent a shockwave through the loose community of historians focused on the Old West -- it was generally assumed that they had been destroyed at some point, surviving only in the occasional excerpt published by the more salacious tabloid newspapers of the day. It’s easy to understand why the discovery was such a sensation: college educated outlaws who can’t stop writing about everything they see, hear, do, and think are rare as hen’s teeth, and Daniel Locke continued to be a particularly witty, insightful, and erudite example of the breed right up to the end of his life. His authorial voice is distinct and precise, with a natural storyteller’s gift for phrase-turning and an artist’s eye for detail. In fact, several of the journals are enlivened with his pen-and-ink drawings and the occasional watercolor rendering of landscapes and his cohorts, as well as duplications of the petroglyph-bearing standing stones that once ringed Deadlock Gorge. A genuine polymath, he spoke and wrote in several languages, including his native English, Spanish, French, modern Italian, Latin, two southern Athabaskan dialects, and Romanian.

The “Romanian Memoirs” are by far the most interesting to me because it is in them, and them alone, that he discusses at any length the ten years he spent in Europe, if only obliquely in many cases. What one can surmise is that he did, indeed, find the school he sought and, after many trials, won entry to it, that he drank deep of the wells of secret knowledge and, contrary to his boasts to the contrary, he was one of the fortunates who left its walls with his soul no more in hock to unholy powers than the cost of his tuition. More importantly, they detail his motives for abandoning a life of wealth and ease among the Yankee upper crust for brutal outlawry on the frontier: something there reached out and called to him almost as soon as he landed at the port of New Orleans and he could no more deny its summons than he could refuse to drink water or breathe air. Something that lay waiting beneath the sands, chained deep within the blood-red stone, something that could not free itself but required willing hands to act as its protector and, eventually, its redeemer. Locke traveled west, across Texas, into the territory of New Mexico, where in the bloody, water-carved canyon that eventually bore a bastardized version of his name, he apparently found what he sought and willingly chose to become its servant, feeding it a bounty of fear and pain and blood. He knew, eventually, that it would have to end -- they were far too bold in their depredations, far too cruel in their savagery to be left to their tasks for very long -- and he evidently prepared for that eventuality. He left his “grimoire” and his tools encased somewhere in the webwork of sandstone caverns woven through the walls of the canyon for his “heirs” to find, a bequest that has, theoretically at least, remained unrecovered.

Daniel Locke, during his time in the west, fathered at least three natural children: his daughters Charity Needless (with Silver City prostitute Katherine Needless) and Amelia Reed (with Ruth Reed, the younger sister of his partner in crime, Sarah Reed) and an unnamed son who was only a few weeks old at the time of Locke’s death. A cursory examination of birth and death records show the descendants of his daughters are scattered all over the southwestern United States. The Reeds relocated to California in the bloody aftermath of the legitimate massacre in Deadlock Gorge. Katherine Needless died of tuberculosis in an asylum in the Arizona Territories -- her daughter became a Ward of the Court, eventually a schoolteacher, and married in due course. If any of them sought the inheritance their father left for them, it has not entered into any historical record that I can access.

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