“I’ve sent you several queries, but you never responded. I’m Davon. From the Dragon Project.” He was looking about. He could see the nearby lines, several of which extended to the horizon and beyond. “Amazing. To actually see them.”
“To see what exactly?”
“The lines. They’re all over the world, you know. But here, you can see them on the surface.”
Reizer had entertained many so-called experts over the years. “And you think they are?”
“Lung mei. That’s Chinese for dragon paths. Lines of power.” He raised his arms and turned slowly while Reizer watched with an amused smile. “Can’t you feel it?”
Reizer did grant him that — the first time she had come here so many years ago she’d felt something, a power in the atmosphere, like the way the air felt before an approaching thunderstorm, but the power came not from above, but from below, from the belly of the Earth itself, she felt.
“Is it a good power, though?” she asked.
Davon shrugged. “It’s power. That’s neither good nor bad. It’s who uses it, and how they use it that determines good or bad.”
“Tell me more about lung mei,” she said.
“I think the gates that are opening now are nodes for the dragon paths,” Davon said. “Where major lines intersect.” He frowned. “This though—” he pointed at the nearest line, a two foot wide etch in the surface of the planet, the main channel—“is different in some way.” He turned to her. “Is there a gate of the Shadow near here?”
“I’ve never seen one nor heard any reported anywhere close by.”
“Strange. There’s nothing like this anywhere else in the world. We have the cliff drawings in England, but that’s not at all similar. I’ve been there. No sense of it like here. I’ve felt something like this at nodes near standing stones and megaliths. But lines, no, I’ve never seen lines even though I knew they were there.” The words were coming out of him like water rushing down a mountain stream.
“There’s Avebury, the Rollright Stones, Carnac, and of course Stonehenge. Massive stones aligned in circles or lines. Along the leys of power. The ancients knew something, didn’t they? Or did they even make them? Maybe the stones are something else?”
Reizer remained quiet, letting the words pour out of him.
“I was visited by a woman a couple of days ago. In England. She was American. Ariana Michelet. She wanted to know about the dragon paths. The nodes. The stones. She said they were connected to the gates, but I already knew that. I took her to the Rollright Stones. I camped in the center of the stones one night. A year ago. And I heard the screams of the damned. And saw the creatures come out of a dark circle in the center of the mist. White, hard skin. Red, glowing eyes. Others who have been in the circles have seen people from other times, did you know that?”
Reizer listened to his manic litany and didn’t interrupt or answer. Everyone had their cross to bear in life and she realized his was his own mind, skittering between lucidity and mania, not completely under his control. His body mimicked his mind, moving about, unable to stay still.
“Tell me about this place.”
Reizer was almost startled by the change in his voice and demeanor. He was still, his tone level and rational, his body still.
She quickly related the various theories and why she didn’t believe them.
“What do you believe?” Davon asked.
“There’s something very important that most people don’t take into account about the Nazca lines,” Reizer said. She paused, finding it strange to be talking here on the plain where she had spent so many years in solitude.
“Go on, please?” Davon pressed.
“I think there are two sets of lines on the plain made at two different times. The geoglyphs, or forms—, which are primarily animal forms- made at a very ancient time, and then the lines and wedges made after that.
“There are many places where the lines or wedges cross the various forms and take supersedence. I think ancient people who lived in this area and sensed the power made the forms. They drew the figures as a means of worship.”
“And the lines and wedges?”
“I don’t think men — or women—” she added with a smile—“ made them.”
“Who then?”
“I think those came from below,” Reizer said. “From the power inside the planet.”
“The Shadow?”
“Seems likely given all that has happened recently.”
Davon looked around at the barren plain. “Why here?”
Reizer hesitated, and then answered. “I don’t know.”
Davon nodded. “Inside the planet — you know scientists really don’t know what’s far inside, at the core.”
“I know.”
Davon looked at her oddly. “Why have you stayed here for so many years?”
For the first time Reizer was uneasy.
“The driver of the truck I hired to bring me here,” Davon continued, “said you were a witch.”
Reizer laughed. “That is because of the brooms.”
“‘The brooms’?”
“When I first arrived here after the war, the lines weren’t clean. Dust and small stones covered many of them. So I swept them.”
Davon looked around. “All of them?”
“All of them. It took me four years. And many, many brooms. And brooms are linked with witches. The people didn’t understand why I came into town every so often and bought more brooms.” She laughed once more. “Perhaps they thought I was flying about.”
“You’ve been here since just after the war, right?”
Reizer nodded.
“And you were born in Germany in 1903.”
Reizer didn’t immediately respond. She’d known there was always the chance someone would find out the truth. “That’s not right. I was just twenty when I came here.”
“Now I know you’re lying.”
Reizer sighed.
“I did some checking on you,” Davon added. “You were born in 1903. To Maria and Klaus Reizer in Dusseldorf. You were married once; your husband was drafted and died on the Eastern Front. I believe his name was Eugen.”
Reizer closed her eyes. She could still see her husband’s face, peering out through a dirty, cracked window near the rear of the train, his hand raised in a farewell as he went back to the war from a short furlough. She had felt in her heart that she would never see him again. She had felt his despair and hopelessness throughout the short five days they’d had together. He’d wanted to leave her with child, but she had taken steps to avoid that. To bring a child into the future that
Germany faced? It would have been insane.
Davon’s voice intruded on her memories. “I am correct?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look your age.”
“The desert air is—” she began, but he cut her off.
“That’s why you stay, isn’t it?” Davon pressed. “The power of the lines. They keep you from aging as quickly, don’t they? You hardly look fifty, yet you’re twice that.”
“I am not sure that is exactly it,” Reizer said. “I think over a hundred years has passed in the rest of the world, but not here.”
“What do you mean?”
Reizer was about to respond when the hairs on the back of her neck tingled, the sensation spreading into her body, racing along her nerve endings. She stood so suddenly the chair fell backward. It was dusk, the sun low on the western horizon, it’s rays almost horizontal.
“Oh, my,” she murmured as a glow appeared due south of them, emanating up from the surface.
“What the hell is that?” Davon demanded, taking an unconscious step toward the glow, which was getting brighter.
“I think you should move,” she said to Davon, who was now straddling the main line.