Some time ago, while I was in La Boca del Diablo, on
my way to the Zone of Silence to do some weekend camping, my van ran over some
scattered pieces of lumber on the road outside of town, and one of my tires
went flat.
As I was preparing to change it, a tall old man with
a long walking pole came by carrying a burlap sack filled with what he said was
game he had trapped in the desert. He
was a strange old guy with a stranger way of speaking. His voice was deep and clear but with an
accent I had never heard anywhere in my travels. It sounded Eastern European to me, but I
could not be sure and I didn't bother to ask his origins. He wore a long wool overcoat with its collar
pulled up around the back of his head.
This, along with his wide brim hat, managed to conceal a good part of
his face so I could not say what he really looked like. What was apparent was that his eyes were an
unusual shade of green and they seemed to shine in the darkness around us. This in itself was disquieting. But while I was busy changing the tire, he
beckoned me to look up at the sky.
Across the firmament of stars, a single craft was passing silently with
a luminous radiance surrounding its circular shape. The old man began to comment on it as we
watched it glide across the moonlit night.
He said, "Do you know who they are?"
I had never seen a UFO before and I was
spellbound. "No," I said. "Do you?"
And it was here that he related the following story
to me as we stood on that dark desert road, watching the shining disk moving
slowly to the east. He spoke in odd
speech patterns, almost poetic, but once I began listening to him, I remained
silent:
"In some ancient long ago," he said,
"the distant land they lived in teemed with an abundance of life, the
vegetation was verdant and lush, with the inhabitants carrying flesh upon their
burdened bones. In that time, the
expanse of the hard terrain was hospitable to the old ones who walked this
piece of solitary earth, hidden by inaccessibility rather than ignorance of its
existence. Shunned for superstitious fears, the abandoned city rests on high
majestic mountains, pinnacled beyond any glimmer of civilization, nestled in
scraggly valleys bathed in shadows and caressed by roving winds that howl like
injured beasts."
At this point, I was astonished to see that the
craft had stopped moving. It was still
and quiet and glowed in the sky like another moon.
The old man continued: "Immeasurable centuries
have passed since the old ones roamed the streets of their primordial metropolis
fashioned from stone with techniques that are as mysterious as they are
forgotten. The city sits hewn from the
very mountain rock it rests on. Slabs long and wide are fitted one against the
other, piled high and strong to boldly mock the passage of mortal time. Those beings who built this terrifying place
never left but vanished into the deepest shadows of their forbidden city,
unseen to the naked eye but vividly perceived by the inner mind where they
frequently appear to sleeping souls in troubled dreams.
Tall structures tell of their alarming stature.
Swarms of crawling reptiles now plague the outwardly abandoned city, slithering
over stone foundations laid out when giant lizards walked the rustic
earth. Cold stone configurations possess
the secrets of their might, their true encryptions known to them and them
alone.
The seasons have seen the coming and goings of these
unique creatures that time has relegated to the beyond; yet, unseen, they
remain, ingrained like silent energy in the ground that bred them, nurtured
them, and absorbed the seas of blood they spelt upon its rugged land. The sound
of silent time has crept over countless years like hidden, swarming serpents,
masking their dreadful presence, knowing of the secret horrors perpetrated on the
unsuspecting masses of the languorous earth.
Through the prisms of their being, they cajole the rest with twisted
madness and distorted reason, seeking to crawl deep into the sanctity of our
dreaded fears, pledged only to hunt for man's collective ruin.
The quiet mountains surrounding their forgotten city
give witness to the radiant ships of light that come from it, rising crafts
conceived by beings of darkness wholly unfathomable to the minds of shallow
men. In these, they ride with the renegade dead, feeding on our mutant
emanations and horror filled desires, carving our sins into edible morsels, and
feasting on our stagnant fears and corrosive hatreds.
They fell from the stars in a past forgotten time,
not solely to propagate or spread their seed, but to create, control and rule
over a newfound kingdom. They fully
claimed the earth, rolled with its timely changes, endeavoring to create the
sentient beings that would give them an unending feast of crippled and corrupted
souls. A troubled lot they knew and
cared for nothing more. Malicious
longings reach for war in all its trappings, in every form conceived. And this alone is all that rules their way of
life, this alone and nothing more.
We belong to them, they say. We are their chattel and their prey.
In myth and lore, you will find their legacy, their
trail of vague deceptions. Their
phantasms are conceived and conjured to mystify the minds of mortal man. In mad ranting, you will find their sway, and
in the eyes of frightened men, you will see the carriage of their will. With cunning slight of hand, they endeavor to
make us think that our duplicity is our desire and our desire alone.
Unseen, they walk among us, haunt chaotic cities and
rural towns, patrol the skies of continents and stroll the passages of our
flimsy structures at their singular resolve, invisible and cunning, blending
into open shadows and stalking in the glare of morning light. They walk the bloodied lands of war in triumph,
these creatures of abundant intellect decry our worth with derisive scorn,
viewing our flesh only as a banquet fit to gorge upon and nothing more. But over that, our minds and hearts is what
they truly want and seek to have by any means at hand.
While we glut on pork and beef and fowl of every
kind, they seek to fill their otherworldly entrails with the eternal essence of
our immortal souls, seasoned with the bitterness of our afflictions.
Look high into the star filled sky and if you spy
their glowing crafts among the billowed clouds, pray to any god you will that
they don't take you to their ancient, awesome city where your valued heart will
find a darkness known only to a few, and there upon their throne of madness you
will surely die."
That is what the old man related to me on that cold
night while I looked at the iridescent craft that hovered silently as if to
listen in on what was being said. But it
wasn't what he said that frightened me.
When I took my eyes off the ship to speak to the old
man, to ask him how he knew all this, I could not find him anywhere in
sight. He had come and left as quietly
as that.