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 cafes 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.