This mountain was an anomaly.
That was impossible.
Reslaw and Minelli had shrugged it off as an interesting if unique error on the maps; a misplacement, like the discovery of some new island in an archipelago, known to the natives but lost in a shuffle of navigators’ charts; a kind of Pitcairn of volcanic mounds.
But the cinder cone was too close to routes traveled at least once or twice a year. Edward knew that it had not been misplaced. He could not deceive himself as his friends did.
Neither could he posit any other explanation.
They walked once again around the base of the mound at midmorning. The sun was already high in the flat, still blue sky. It was going to be a hot day. Red-haired, stocky Reslaw sipped coffee from a green-enameled Thermos bottle, a serviceable antique purchased in a rock-and-junk shop in Shoshone; Edward chewed on a granola bar and sketched details in a small black cloth-bound notebook. Minelli trailed them, idly chipping at boulders with a rock pick, his loose, lanky form, unkempt black hair, and pale skin giving him the appearance of a misplaced urban scrounger.
He stopped ten yards behind Edward. “Hey,” he called out. “Did you see this?”
“What?”
“A hole.”
Edward turned back. Reslaw glanced back at them, shrugged, and continued around the mound to the north.
The hole was about a meter wide and slanted upward into the mass of the mound. Edward had not seen it because it began in deep shadow, under a ledge illuminated by the warm rays of the sun. “It’s not a flow tube. Look how smooth,” Minelli said. “No collapse, no patterns.”
“Bad geology,” Edward commented. If the mound is a fake, then this is the first mistake.
“Hm?”
“It’s not natural. Looks like some prospector got here before us.”
“Why dig a hole in a cinder cone?”
“Maybe it’s an Indian cave,” Edward offered lamely. The hole disturbed him.
“Indians with diamond drills? Not likely,” Minelli said with a faint edge of scorn. Edward ignored his tone and stepped on a lava boulder to get a better look up into the darkness. He pulled a flashlight from his belt and squeezed it to shine a beam into the depths. Smooth-bored matte-finish lava walls absorbed the light beyond eight or ten meters; to that point, the tunnel was straight and featureless, inclining upward at about thirty degrees.
“Do you smell something?” Minelli asked.
Edward sniffed. “Yeah. What is it?”
“I’m not sure…”
The odor was faint and smooth and sweet, slightly acrid. It did not encourage further investigation. “Like a lab smell,” Minelli said.
“That’s it,” Edward agreed. “Iodine. Crystalline iodine.”
“Right.”
Minelli’s forehead wrinkled in a mock fit of manic speculation. “Got it,” he said. “This is a junkie rock. A sanitary junkie cinder cone.”
Edward ignored him again. Minelli was infamous for a sense of humor so strange it hardly ever produced anything funny. “Needle mark,” Minelli explained in an undertone, realizing his failure. “You still think this isn’t a map mistake?”
“If you found a street in New York City, not on any map, wouldn’t you be suspicious?”
“I’d call up the mapmakers.”
“Yeah, well, this place is as crowded as New York City, as far as geologists are concerned.”
“All right,” Minelli conceded. “So it’s new. Just popped up out of nowhere.”
“That sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?” Edward said. “Your idea, not mine.”
Edward backed away from the hole and suppressed a shiver. A new mole and it won’t go away; a blemish that shouldn’t be here.
“What’s Reslaw doing?” Minelli asked. “Let’s find him.”
“This-a-way,” Edward said, pointing north. “We can still catch up.”
They heard Reslaw call out.
He had not gone far. At the northernmost point of the mound’s base, they found him squatting on top of a beetle-shaped lava boulder.
“Tell me I’m not seeing what I’m seeing,” he said, pointing to the shade below the rock. Minelli made a face and hurried ahead of Edward.
In the sand, two meters from the boulder, lay something that at first glance resembled a prehistoric flying creature, a pteranodon perhaps, wings folded, canted over to one side.
It was not mineral, Edward decided immediately; it certainly didn’t resemble any animal he had seen. That it might be a distorted plant, a peculiar variety of succulent or cactus, seemed the most likely explanation.
Minelli edged around the find, cautiously giving it a berth of several yards. Whatever it was, it was about the size of a man, bilaterally symmetric and motionless, dusty gray-green with touches of pastel flesh-pink. Minelli stopped his circling and simply gaped.
“I don’t think it’s alive,” Reslaw said.
“Did you touch it?” Minelli asked.
“Hell no.”
Edward kneeled before it. There was a definite logic to the thing; a kind of head two feet long and shaped rather like a bishop’s miter, or a flattened artillery shell, point down in the sand; a knobby pair of shoulder blades behind the fan-crest of the miter; short thin trunk and twisted legs in squat position behind that. Stubby six-digit feet or hands on the ends of the limbs.
Not a plant.
“Is it a corpse, maybe?” Minelli asked. “Wearing something, like a dog, you know, covered with clothes—”
“No,” Edward said. He couldn’t take his eyes away from the thing. He reached out to touch it, then reconsidered and slowly withdrew his fingers.
Reslaw climbed down from the boulder. “Scared me so bad I jumped,” he explained.
“Jesus Christ,” Minelli said. “What do we do?”
The snout of the miter lifted from the sand and three glassy eyes the color of fine old sherry emerged. The shock was so great that none of the three moved. Edward finally took a step back, almost reluctantly. The eyes in the miter-head followed him, then sank away again, and the head nodded back into the sand. A sound issued from the thing, muffled and indistinct.
“I think we should go,” Reslaw said.
“It’s sick,” Minelli said.
Edward looked for footprints, hidden strings, signs of a prank. He was already convinced this was no prank, but it was best to be sure before committing oneself to a ridiculous hypothesis.
Another muffled noise.
“It’s saying something,” Reslaw said.
“Or trying to,” Edward added.
“It isn’t really ugly, is it?” Minelli asked. “It’s kind of pretty.”
Edward hunkered down and approached the thing again, edging forward one booted foot at a time.
The thing lifted its head and said very clearly,”I am sorry, but there is bad news.”
“What?” Edward jerked, his voice cracking.
“God almighty,” Reslaw cried.
“I am sorry, but there is bad news.”
“Are you sick?” Edward asked.
“There is bad news,” it repeated.
“Can we help you?”
“Night. Bring night.” The voice had the whispering quality of wind-blown leaves, not unpleasant by itself, but chilling in context. A waft of iodine smell made Edward recoil, lips curled back.
“It’s morning,” Edward said. “Won’t be night for—”
“Shade,” Minelli said, his face expressing intense concern. “It wants to be in shade.”
“I’ll get the tent,” Reslaw said. He jumped down from the boulder and ran back to the camp. Minelli and Edward stared at each other, then at the thing canted over in the sand.
“We should get the hell out of here,” Minelli said.
“We’ll stay,” Edward said.
“Right.” Minelli’s expression changed from concern to puzzled curiosity. He might have been staring at a museum specimen in a bottle. “This is really, wonderfully ridiculous.”
“Bring night,” the thing pleaded.
Shoshone seemed little more than a truck stop on the highway, a caf6 and the rock shop, a post office and grocery store. Off the highway, however, a gravel road curved past a number of tree-shaded bungalows and a sprawling modern one-story house, then ran arrow-straight between venerable tamarisk trees and by a four-acre swamp to a hot-spring-fed pool and trailer court. The small town was home to some three hundred permanent residents, and at the peak of the tourist season — late September through early May — hosted an additional three hundred snowbirds and backpackers and the occasional team of geologists. Shoshone called itself the gateway to Death Valley, between Baker to the south and Furnace Creek to the north. To the east, across the Mojave, the Resting Spring, Nopah and Spring ranges, and the Nevada state line, was Las Vegas, the closest major city.