God's Junk Drawer, page 8
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
They hiked for another ten minutes before the trees abruptly ended at a broad swath of sand, like a beach. The type of pristine beach you saw in commercials for Hawaiian vacations. It even had a faintly cool, briny scent, but with no ocean in sight. Someone had found a big, wide clearing in the woods and covered every inch of it with sand. No trees, no bushes, nothing but white sand.
Almost nothing.
A dozen yards into the beach-clearing stood a miniature Washington Monument made of gray-brown stone and twenty-three feet tall, by Parker’s eye. It didn’t look like it sloped in, either. A straight, square pillar, about thirty inches across on each side, with a pyramid at the top. A herringbone pattern covered big swaths of the thing, and from this distance she couldn’t tell if the pattern was part of the stone or something carved into it.
Noah walked out into the sand, glanced back, waved them closer. He looked happy but distracted. Energized. Like a little kid riding a sugar high.
“Definitely don’t remember seeing that on the hike before,” said Josh.
“It’s the granite obelisk,” said Noah. He waved a hand up the hill. “I saw it through a break in the trees.”
“Obelisk,” repeated Josh.
“Fancy word for pointed column,” said Kyle.
“I know what it means.”
Parker took a few steps forward. The sand felt . . . deep. It shifted a little under her feet. It wasn’t sitting on top of leaves or grass or anything. It was sand all the way down. She took another few steps until she was next to Noah, then realized everyone else was moving with her. They approached the pillar of stone.
Sam looked . . . excited. Gleeful almost. “These are in the books. They’re all over the valley, right? Six of them?” He looked back at Noah.
“Yep.” Noah’d already forgotten the stone monument, looking around the clearing, pointing back the way they’d come. “If we’re here, and the wall is that way, then the castle should be right around—”
“Are these runes?” Logan crouched close to the obelisk.
“Yep,” said Noah. He looked up over the trees, clearly trying to find some sort of landmark. Parker’s instincts kicked in, wanting to help him, wanting to ask questions about the castle, but . . .
She stepped closer to the strange obelisk. The herringbone pattern resolved into strings of tiny symbols carved into the stone. Circles and hexagons with lines coming off them in different ways. To her eyes it looked more like Thai than runes, and she briefly regretted not paying attention when her grandmother’d tried to teach the language to her.
“It looks like the Matrix code,” said Josh. “All the streaming letters and numbers.”
“Except there’s no letters or numbers,” Olivia said.
“That we recognize,” said Kyle. He reached out a finger to touch the engraved symbols. Hesitated. Pulled his hand back. Stretched his finger out again. Stopped again.
“What’s wrong?” Parker asked.
“I can’t touch it.”
“What do you mean?”
Kyle glanced at her. “I mean . . . I can’t touch it. I can’t get close enough.”
Olivia rolled her eyes and went to put her palm on the obelisk. She halted two inches from it. “What the hell?”
“Is it an optical illusion?” asked Josh.
Parker reached out her own hand and felt . . . resistance? It reminded her of trying to push magnets together, feeling them gently deflect away from each other. “I think it’s some kind of . . . force field?”
Logan put out his hand like a claw, trying to touch with all his fingertips. “It’s like the air gets thick around it. Like a barrier.”
“So . . . a force field,” Parker said.
“Yeah, I guess so. Sorry.”
Kyle took a step back and leaned forward, putting both hands on the obelisk’s face. Trying to anyway. He dug his heels in and pushed. Parker and Logan both moved in close, watching the narrow gap between Kyle’s palms and the stone. He grunted, pushed harder, and his feet slid in the sand.
His hands never got any closer.
“There are six obelisks all around the valley,” said Sam, nodding back at Noah. “All made out of different materials, but they’re identical other than that. They had all these weird rules and conditions about touching them.”
“Rules?” asked Parker.
“Like, some you could touch during the night or day, but not the other way around. Some you could never touch. There’s one that glows in the dark and one that knocks you out and another one shoots lightning or electricity or something like that.”
Josh reached up high and tried to press his hand against one of the less-engraved spots with no success. “How do you know which one’s which?”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t remember. Sorry.”
“I thought you read the books?”
“When I was twelve.”
“The books got half of it wrong anyway,” Noah called out to them. “Come on, we need to get going.”
“Hang on,” said Parker. “What is this?”
“It’s the granite obelisk.”
“Yeah, but what is it? Where did it come from?”
He shrugged. “No idea. They were here when my family arrived. Watch this.”
Noah stepped back toward the trees, scanned the ground, and picked up a thick chunk of gray bark the size and rough shape of a paperback book. He took a few steps forward and spun it at the obelisk like a frisbee. It hit the stone with a soft thud and bounced off, scattering a few bits as it fell to the ground.
“Did that hit?” asked Logan. “Like actual contact?”
Noah nodded. “But if you try to touch the obelisk while you’re holding the bark, it won’t work.”
Kyle scooped up the fallen chunk of bark and held it toward the obelisk. It moved closer, then tilted and twisted in his fingers. He tried to hold it tight and the bark trembled a few inches from the stone surface.
The idea of repelling magnets swam through Parker’s mind again.
Kyle pushed hard and the piece of bark crumbled apart in the air. He held onto the back half, then tossed it. The bark made a scratching noise as it hit the stone and slid down to the base of the obelisk. “What the fuck,” he murmured.
Olivia traced one of the lines of tiny shapes and lines in the air. “Does anyone recognize the symbols? Any of them?”
Most of them shook their heads. Josh tilted his head to look at one set. “Are they even a language? Or is it just fancy decoration?”
“Or pictographs,” said Sam. He had his phone out, snapping picture after picture of the engraved stone. “Less a language and more of a comic book, sort of.”
Kyle smirked. “You think this is a record of when the mighty hexagon people conquered the squiggly lines?”
Sam leaned back and lined up another picture. “Sure, why not.”
Parker looked at Noah.
He shrugged. “I just know I spent a lot of time throwing stuff at it when I was a kid.”
She looked back and forth between the towering column and the professor. “And you’ve got no idea what it is?”
“None.”
“Is it from the future?” asked Josh. “Or is it some sort of, like, lost civilization thing? From Atlantis or Lemuria or something?”
Noah shrugged again. “It doesn’t matter.” He started across the white sand.
Parker recoiled like she’d been slapped. “It doesn’t matter?”
“Not to me. I didn’t come back here to study the obelisks.”
“But aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know?”
“Nope.” He pointed at the far side of the sandy clearing. “We want to go this way. Lookout Hill should be a little over half a mile.”
“Lookout Hill?” Parker called after him, trying to catch up. She glanced back. The others were following too, reluctantly leaving the obelisk behind.
“It’s a gigantic rock,” he explained, not looking back. “But it’s almost a hundred feet up, higher than everything else in this part of the valley. We can get our bearings again, see everything, send signals.”
“Signals?” Josh had almost caught up to them.
“When my family was here, we all carried little round mirrors. Well, the tops of cans we polished until they were really shiny. If we got lost or separated, it was the easiest way to signal each other.”
“Fascinating,” sighed Kyle.
Noah glanced at him. “If you like, we can leave you behind and see what you come up with on your own.”
“No. Sorry. Look, I’m just . . . this is all a bit much, you know?”
“It’s a lot to take in.” He looked ahead. “I wish none of you had to.”
“Yeah. Well . . .” Whatever Kyle planned to say, he swallowed it. He gave Parker a look, then slowed his pace.
Parker glanced over her shoulder. Josh was almost next to her. Sam and Kyle were close behind. Logan and Olivia lagged, looking back at the granite obelisk. “Keep up,” she called to them.
Logan waved in acknowledgment. So did Olivia, but she only used one finger.
Parker shoved down more angry thoughts that swelled up in her mind. Her scalp itched along the scab, and she brushed her fingers across it. Focus on helping Noah. He knew this place. He knew what he was doing.
They walked back into the trees and traveled in relative silence. Parker listened to the sounds of the forest. Faint sounds drifted through the trees, and it gnawed at her how many she couldn’t identify. Animals? Birds? The forest was alive, but . . .
She stopped and looked around. Can’t see the forest for the trees flashed through her mind, and it seemed the inverse of that held true. She hadn’t looked at the individual trees as they’d been walking. Really, she’d been following Noah and not looking around at all. At some point the evergreens had been replaced by palm trees. Dozens of them, at least. Maybe over a hundred. Even the ground cover was different. Suddenly they were walking in a rainforest.
Logan let out a squawk. They all jerked to a halt, and Parker turned in time to see something dark bounding over a fallen palm frond and off through the woods in broad leaps. The ground crunched with each contact, and then the shape vanished behind a tree. They heard a few more rustling leaps and then nothing.
“What was it?” Parker asked.
Olivia shook her head once, still staring after it. “I don’t know.”
Logan slapped his chest twice to calm himself. “I saw a shape by that rock, and then I saw eyes and realized it was watching—”
“It was a cat,” said Kyle. “Just a stray cat out in the woods.”
“Probably,” said Noah. “There were at least a half dozen cats here when I was a kid.” He stared after it, then continued through the woods.
“You kept one as a pet, right?” Sam phrased it as a question, but Parker knew the tone from helping with so many undergrad classes. Less a question, more confirmation.
“Yep. Dad told us not to name them. That I shouldn’t get too attached to anything out in the wild. But one kept showing up at the edge of the Boneyard and we ended up adopting him.”
“Charlie.”
“Yep.” A faint smile crossed Noah’s face.
“Should we go after it?” asked Logan. “The cat? If it’s lost here, too . . .”
“It probably grew up here,” said Josh. He had something in his hand, a transparent rectangle with a compass ring on it. “Might be a whole feral cat colony.”
“So it’s not dinosaurs we need to worry about,” said Olivia, “it’s getting eaten by cats.”
“Come on,” said Parker. “We need to keep up with him.” She pointed after Noah. He’d already gotten a hundred feet ahead of them and didn’t seem to notice they weren’t behind him.
She hurried after him. So did the others. The group stayed a little tighter.
“Just pointing out,” Kyle said quietly, “this could all be some kind of super-elaborate prank or something.”
“We’re in the valley,” said Sam.
“That doesn’t really mean anything.”
“It does, you just don’t like it.”
Kyle waved a dismissive hand. “I’m just saying, I haven’t seen a damned thing that couldn’t just be New England woods.”
“Palm trees,” Logan said, pointing up.
“Set dressing.”
“And that obelisk,” added Olivia. “With a few hundred tons of sand all around it.”
“Somebody’s weird art project,” Kyle replied. “Remember during the Covid lockdown when those chrome-metal monoliths showed up all over the world and went viral?”
“The obelisk none of us could touch,” Parker added.
Josh coughed. “The dinosaur?”
Kyle paused. “It was dark. Are we all really sure about what we saw?”
“Yes,” said Sam.
Olivia nodded
Josh tilted his compass back and forth as they gained on Noah. Held it up. Tilted it again.
“You need help with that?” asked Logan.
“No,” said Josh. “Must’ve broken it in the fall.”
“How do you break a compass?”
“I don’t know. You can break anything, can’t you?” He pointed a finger at Logan’s cracked glasses, then held up the clear rectangle. “The needle just spins back and forth.”
“You need to let it settle,” Kyle said.
“Gee, thanks. I’ve never used a compass before.”
“Have you?”
“Yeah.”
Parker shot Kyle a look. “He’s the guide, remember?”
“No he isn’t,” Logan said. “The guy on the website’s completely different.”
“What?”
“It’s a franchise thing,” Josh explained. “Like Santa Claus.”
Kyle shook his head. “He’s a fake. Maybe he’s in on all of this.”
Parker bit her lip. She’d been so focused on the mystery of Sam during their hike up the mountain, she’d only half registered all the oddness about Josh, even after he said to call him by a different name.
The guide shoved the compass back in his pocket. “I’m a friend of Skip’s. The real Skip. We’ve known each other since high school. I was visiting, he came down with a bad case of food poisoning, and I offered to come out here with all of you.”
“Why?” asked Parker.
“So he wouldn’t lose the job. Even giving me a cut, this was a good gig for him. He didn’t want to cancel.”
“So you’re not really a guide,” said Olivia.
“Well, no, I’m not licensed by the state or anything. But Skip and I have done this hike more than a dozen times together.”
Kyle shorted out a laugh. “It ever go like this before?”
Josh managed a faint smile. “Not exactly like this but . . . we did see a bear once.”
“I’ve been on a dozen planes,” said Olivia. “Doesn’t make me a pilot.”
Parker bit back a sigh. “Are you complaining about his qualifications as a guide?”
“I’m just saying.”
“It’s no big deal,” Josh said. He tipped his head toward Noah, a few yards ahead. “But for what it’s worth, I know we’ve walked further than half a mile. And I don’t see a hill anywhere.”
They all looked around. Parker took a few quick steps and put herself next to Noah. “I thought you said it was only half a mile to your lookout point?”
He glanced at her, and she recognized the faint wrinkle over his left eyebrow that meant confusion. “A little over. I remember my dad telling me that at least twenty times. I always whined about walking and he’d say it’s only half a mile.”
“Maybe he was lying to you.”
Parker and Noah glanced back. Logan had caught up with them. Olivia still hung back, closer to the end of the little group.
“Not maliciously, I mean,” Logan explained. “Just, y’know, how parents lie to kids sometimes to get them to be quiet or keep them happy and stuff.”
“White lies,” said Parker.
“Right.”
“My dad didn’t lie to me,” said Noah. “And I walked this route a hundred times, easy.”
“Maybe it’s because you were a little kid,” said Sam, ambling a little closer. “You know, everything seems bigger, then you come back and it’s all shrunk.”
“But it doesn’t seem smaller.” Parker waved a hand at their rough route through the trees. “It seems further.”
“We may be a little off course,” Noah admitted. “It’s been a while for me, okay?”
She slowed her pace. Logan took the hint. Sam didn’t, so she grabbed his little backpack and pulled. “Give him some space,” she said. “He’s trying to figure things out.” Kyle walked past them, oblivious to their created distance and Parker’s glare.
“Hey,” said Josh. ”Look at those guys.” He pointed up into a tree.
Two black birds clung to the side of a palm tree, watching them. Just like the long-necked one that had hovered over Parker when she woke up. The pair hunched on either side of the trunk, watching the people with gleaming, gold-green eyes.
“Do they have . . . tails?” asked Olivia, stepping closer.
“Yes, birds have tails,” Parker said with a sigh.
Logan tilted his head. Leaned closer to the tree. “Not like that.”
Parker looked at the birds again.
Half-camouflaged by the dozens of vertical shadows stretching behind them, a long, straight tail hung from each bird. Each was maybe as wide as her thumb and a foot long, more like what she’d expect on a cat than anything she’d ever seen on a bird. They even had a tuft on the end, like a lion. While she looked, one of the birds swished its tail stiffly back and forth.
“Are those crows?” asked Kyle, suddenly back with them, his voice a little too loud, as usual.
The first bird took off in a frenzy of flapping wings, throwing itself up off the tree trunk and flying away. The second, the braver one, glared at the group for a moment longer, tapping its oversized talons against the palm tree’s wood-like husks before it spread its wings. The tuft of its long tail fanned out into a wide triangle of feathers.
Then it leaped into the air, spread a second set of wings, and soared off through the forest after its mate, all four limbs stretched wide.
