Novel 1987 - The Haunted Mesa (v5.0) (3 page)

“What is it? What's wrong?”

Again that hesitation. Was he speaking from a public phone? Were there others around, perhaps listening? “Tell you when you get here. You'd think I was off my rocker.” He hesitated again. “At least, anybody else would.”

They had said their good-byes and then Erik had said, quickly. “Mike? Please! I'm desperate!”

Mike remembered how he had hung up, startled, staring at the phone. That was so unlike Erik Hokart. The man must truly be in trouble, but at that time he had not connected it to his own knowledge of the country. Somehow the two ideas had not come together in his mind. Had he realized…

Then he got the letter. The writing was erratic, totally unlike Erik's.

For God's sake, come at once!
I need you, Mike, if ever I needed anyone. If it's money, I'll pay, but come! And be careful. Trust no one. No one at all.

Meet me on the Canyon road, you know the one. If I am not there, for God's sake, find me!

If anyone can handle this it will be you. I am sending the record as far as it goes. Get us out of this, Mike, and I'll be forever indebted.

Chapter 3

U
S? WAS SOMEONE with him then? Mike had worried about that plural more than once since the letter arrived, and during his flight west. None of it made sense. Erik had always been a loner, attractive to women but seemingly not attracted by them.

Mike Raglan turned the idea over in his mind while dressing. Then he made coffee and seated himself at a table where he could see both the glass doors and the front entrance. He put the .357 on the table in front of him.

He was not expecting trouble, yet they had gone so far as to force an entry to his condo in the night. What might follow he did not know.

He opened the daybook, and using his thumb as a marker he sat back, curiously reluctant to delve into its contents. Men had taken the country too much for granted. The obvious dangers and benefits tended to obscure much else, and most people had thought of the West in terms of fur, buffalo, gold, silver, cowboys, Indians, and cattle, rarely looking beyond the surface.

The Indians the white man met were no more the original inhabitants of the country than were the Normans and Saxons the original inhabitants of England. Other peoples had come and gone before, leaving only their shadows upon the land. Yet some had gone into limbo leaving not only physical artifacts but spiritual ones as well. Often, encroaching tribes borrowed from those who preceded them, accepting their values as a way of maintaining harmony with the natural world.

There were ancient mysteries, old gods who retired into the canyons to await new believers who would bring them to life once more.

Who has walked the empty canyons or the lonely land above the timber and not felt himself watched? Watched by what ghost from a nameless past? From out of what pit of horror and fear?

The Indian had always known he was not alone. He knew there were
others,
things that observed. When a man looked quickly up, was it a movement he saw or only his imagination?

The terms we use for what is considered supernatural are woefully inadequate. Beyond such terms as
ghost, specter, poltergeist, angel, devil,
or
spirit,
might there not be something more our purposeful blindness has prevented us from understanding?

We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds
here
? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this?

If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?

Each year our knowledge progresses, each year we push back the curtain of ignorance, but there remains so much to learn. Our theories are only dancing shadows against a hard wall of reality.

How few answers do we possess! How many phenomena are ignored because they do not fall into accepted categories!

Ours is a world that has developed along materialistic, mechanistic lines, but might there not be other ways? Might there not be dozens of other ways, unknown and unguessed because of the one we found that worked?

Mike Raglan refilled his cup and put the daybook on the table. He did not know the answers. He had seen things and heard things that made him wonder. In a lifetime devoted to exposing fraud and deception, investigating haunted houses, mediums, and cult religions, he had come upon a few things that left him uneasy.

That man now? The one he had found in his condo, stealing his book. Who was he? Why did he want the daybook? Did he want it for himself or was he sent by someone to find it?

Why Mike had the impression, he did not know, but he did believe the man was sent by others. He had obviously come to secure the daybook, and he might return.

He agreed with the girl at the desk that there was something about him, some aura of strangeness. Yet he also had the look of a professional, a man who knew his job and how to go about it.

Mike took up the book. It was an ordinary loose-leaf notebook with ruled pages, and Erik had written with a brush pen. The writing was thick, black, easily read.

Landed on mesa top. It is certainly different, as we perceived from the air. The top a rough oval, absolutely flat and tufted with short bunches of vegetation. Soil deep but seems to have been badly leached. Along one side an edging of crags, yet the rocks themselves are smooth. The mesa falls off steeply on that side. On the other sides it also falls steeply away. Oddly enough, seems to have been purposely ringed with slabs of rock. Most unusual. My impression, which may be mistaken, is that the mesa top may have been cultivated in the far-distant past.

Found three walls almost intact. Roofed them with plywood sheet. Will do nicely for sleeping and a construction shanty while building. A table for blueprints, a corner for tools, one room for camping under cover.

View tremendous! San Juan River lies below. Across the river a huge mesa rears its head. Must be nearly ten miles long, talus slope, and last three to five hundred feet are sheer rock. That must be the one called No Man's Mesa, probably for good reasons.

Sunday. Relaxed today, scouted around, worked on the walls of my shelter. Remarkably well built. Mortar treated with substance to make it set harder. It is different from other cliff houses or pueblos, but styles vary and the builders were learning as they worked.

The house I plan to build, doing most of the work myself, will consist of ten rooms, and a patio, all from native stone and built into the rocks that back up the mesa at that point. The building may require a year or more. This is a dream house, the site chosen because it is one of the most remote in the country.

Monday. Awakened by fierce growling. Chief on his feet, teeth bared, every hair bristling, growling deep in his chest. Chief is unusually large, weighing 160 pounds. The Tibetan mastiffs have been guard dogs for thousands of years, known to fight bears, tigers, or wild yak, to attack anything invading their premises.

It was the middle of the night. I spoke sharply but he continued to growl. Rising up from the army cot that was my bed, I saw a faint reddish glow emanating from the adjoining room. For a moment I feared the place was afire but the color was wrong. Catching up my pistol I stepped into the next room, prepared for I know not what. I stopped, astonished. The red glow was coming from my blueprint!

There, drawn into my plans with a glowing red line was another room! A round room, resembling a kiva of the cliff dwellers!

Mike Raglan put down the book and stared out at the snow. The tracks of his recent visitor were still clearly marked in the snow between his condo and the highway, so that at least was no dream.

His coffee was cold. He walked to the sink and emptied his cup, then ran it full of hot water to heat the cup again. He liked his coffee hot and a warm cup kept it so longer. He refilled the cup with coffee and went back to his seat.

No wonder Erik had sent for him! The trouble was that, for the time being at least, Mike Raglan had had enough of puzzles and mysteries. What he wanted now was peace and quiet, time to think, to study, to consider some of the things he had learned, or thought he had learned.

He had been orphaned at twelve, when his parents drove into a filling station during a holdup and were shot dead without any awareness of what was happening. The next two years he had lived on a ranch, helping with the work, riding, and hunting. The family then broke up in a divorce and for a year he worked as an assistant to a carnival magician working the county fairs. Following that, he ran a shooting gallery at an amusement park. He had become a better than average shot while working on the ranch but at the shooting gallery he perfected his skills.

When the season closed he spent several months out of work. He was often hungry, and the few jobs he could find were hard labor.

When spring came again he returned to the carnival, operating the shooting gallery on his own. Twice, when the magician was too far gone in his cups, Mike had carried on with his show. The magician was a Lebanese and from him Mike picked up a smattering of Arabic. At sixteen he was doing a man's work and accepting a man's responsibilities. He gave his age as twenty-four.

Knowing the show offered no future, he made a point of making local contacts wherever they went. The result was a job that paid little more than room and board with a small-town daily paper and job printer. For the next seven months he swept floors, answered the telephone, delivered orders, and did whatever needed doing. In the meantime, he read.

He haunted the public library, helped out occasionally in a secondhand bookstore, trying to get some of the education he had missed. By the end of the third month he was writing occasional pieces for the paper and selling a few ads. By the end of the fifth month he received a small raise.

His social life was almost nonexistent. He talked to waitresses in cafés where he ate, with his boss or the tramp printer who worked the presses.

His first contact away from work was with a former missionary who had become a professor of Bible studies at a local college. The professor had lived in Damascus and spoke Arabic, so they often spoke the language, enabling him to become fluent. Several times he attended his friend's classes, picking up a bit of Bible knowledge as well as learning of the Holy Lands.

He began dating a local girl but her parents disapproved. Who was he, after all, but a drifter with no future? Smoothly but effectually her parents broke it off; at the time he was heartbroken, with a feeling he had been treated unjustly.

He moved on, worked in lumber woods, managed to sell an article on carnival life, and another on deer to a wildlife journal. Again he went to work for a small-town daily, and when the editor-operator became ill, ran the paper for him until his recovery was complete. His career underwent a sudden change when the editor returned.

A few days before, a man had arrived in town who professed to communicate with the dead. Before their eyes he received messages from long-dead relatives of the townspeople, including advice for the lovelorn as well as suggestions on how to invest their money.

Melburn called him into the office. “Mike? Didn't you work with a magic show once?”

“Yeah!”

“Have you been hearing about this medium who just came to town? Could he be faking it?”

“He is a fake. He's using one of the oldest routines in the world. We used it in carnivals to read hidden messages.”

“I want you to expose him, Mike. Then do a story about it. He's been telling old Mrs. McKenna that he has a communication from her dead husband on how she should invest her savings.”

“You want me to attend a seance?”

“Yes, I do. Get the goods on him, do a story on it, and we can syndicate the story.”

He had exposed the charlatan and, after the story's syndication, followed it with an article on a haunted house. Unwittingly, he had found his career.

A national magazine hired him to do a series on haunted houses; another followed on famous magicians. A visit to Haiti and the resulting book on voodoo brought him a best seller. After that he began a series of trips to far-out, mysterious places. In the Sahara he visited the tomb of Tin Hinan, followed by the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, then to Socotra, the Enchanter's Island. He had spent most of a year in Tibet.

In the space of a year he became an international celebrity. He dug into history to uncover strange events, studied phenomena ignored by science, and although an acknowledged skeptic, he closed his mind to nothing. Quick to detect fraud, he had also come to realize there was a residue of something, something not quite explainable by any method he knew. At least not by present knowledge.

Time and again he had found himself skirting something shadowy, something that lacked substance yet seemed to be there. Many times he found it necessary to pursue other angles of approach, and it was upon one of these problems that he first met Erik Hokart.

Hokart was an inventor, a specialist in some areas of electronics. Far more than most research scientists Hokart was keenly aware of the commercial possibilities of some of their discoveries. The result was that he had gone into business and made millions, promptly retiring to enjoy what he had.

It was Erik who had guided Mike Raglan through some of the labyrinths of mathematics and physics. Often they discussed Erik's obsession with the canyon country of Utah and Arizona, and a place in which to build.

The final choice had been Erik's own. Had Mike known, he would have strongly advised Erik Hokart to choose another place, yet what reasons could he have given?

Mike Raglan looked again across the snow where the mysterious white van had stood waiting.

Another occupant? Or simply an empty van? Was there one man or two? Or more?

Uneasily, he considered what little he knew. Erik was in trouble. Erik had contrived, somehow, to have this daybook delivered to him.