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he winding drive south through Chino Hills and into Carbon Canyon was something I had enjoyed more than once before—particularly after rain, when the usually dry, brown-grey landscape would erupt in brilliant green for a fleeting few days. That was the case on the day of my first visit to Chaparral Heights, in the middle of March; the scenery could not have been more inviting.
But my mind fidgeted nervously between those hills, unable to expel the thought of their violent birth: a smashing together of vast primeval forces, a wrenching upheaval of what we consider today to be “solid ground.”
Sooner than I expected, I noticed the entrance to Chaparral Canyon Parkway. I must have previously disregarded it as a private driveway (and perhaps it had been, and became a public thoroughfare as the community grew). It was flanked by chain-link fencing that disappeared into a mixture of ivy and darker green foliage. Eucalyptus and sycamore trees extended above, fracturing the view of some higher ground on the other side.
I turned west, off Carbon Canyon Road, and rumbled across a little bridge onto the parkway. A ditch for drainage or irrigation passed under the structure through a wide segment of pipe that reverberated the sound of my tires crossing over.
Then, breaching the plane of the fence, I detected a palpable change—but in what, exactly, I can’t say. A fluctuation of air temperature, a loss of radio reception, a departure from the road I knew—these factors inadequately represented the freak combination of thought and feeling that writhed into my consciousness at that moment, like a bean sprout in a time-lapse video. I acquired a sense of being accompanied by an unfamiliar presence, something that stowed away inside me and stared outward, unblinking.
It remains to this day.
Chaparral Canyon Parkway meandered along the base of a ridge of hills, and soon I saw narrow cross-streets climbing to graduated tiers of houses. I knew this must be the eastern slope of the original Chaparral Heights development. Continuing south, I rounded a protruding hillside and was immediately struck by the anomalistic outline of Robert’s plateau looming ahead.
From my vantage point, it resembled a clay birthday cake decorated on top with suburbia in miniature: tract homes and family wagons, street lamps and neatly groomed trees arranged over a thin, uniform veneer of green landscaping. But the plateau looked out of place in these hills, and its crowning settlements only compounded the inconsistency. The resulting impression was of a village that the earth was rejecting and pushing away.
The Parkway continued around the plateau to the south and west. From the road, I saw no sign of the precarious cliff-trail Robert had described seven years earlier. I finally reached a four-way stop at Arrow Trail Drive, where an expensive-looking stone wall bore the designation, THE MESA, in suspended brass lettering. I turned right and ascended a steep incline along the southwestern face of the plateau.
Having failed to find a convenient spot to pull over near the bottom of the cliffs, I resolved to leave my car at Arrow Trail Park and return to the canyon floor on foot. The park itself was quite unremarkable, with the same generic, prefabricated amenities that are common among public facilities. The place was empty except for a young woman supervising a pair of toddlers in the playground.
Before heading back down Arrow Trail Drive, I wanted to see what the cliffs looked like from the top. I wondered how much erosion might have occurred since the winter of 1987 when, as Robert reported, six feet of earth crumbled off the side of the plateau, leaving ten to twenty feet of ground outside the perimeter fence at the time.
The playground was directly between me and the cliffs, so I tried to think of something to ask the woman as I passed. She clearly noticed me approaching from the only car in the parking lot, and conspicuously turned her attention back to the children. As I eventually came within speaking range, I decided not to address her at all, to walk by at a courteous distance. The visceral strangeness I had felt upon parting from Carbon Canyon Road was surging up again, and I was sure it would have made any attempt at interaction hopelessly awkward.
“Are you lost?” the young woman broke the silence as I strolled near. I had hoped to appear more casual, less concerned with my surroundings than I truly was. Evidently, I could convince neither of us that I belonged there. I could only try not to provoke suspicion.
“Sir?” she addressed me again. Her tone conveyed more than mild curiosity.
Standing in place, I replied, “Should I not be here right now?”
“Of course you can be here,” she retorted, “it’s a public park, isn’t it? But no one is ever here on weekdays. Are you looking for something?”
“I’m in the market for real estate,” I lied.
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“How are the schools here?” I asked, as if I also had children.
“Very good, from what I hear. Mine aren’t quite at that age yet. But they say a lot of kids from Chaparral Heights High go on to Cal Tech, MIT, Stanford . . . .”
“That’s great,” I said, sounding incredibly phony to myself. I looked over at her toddlers playing with sand and water in bright plastic buckets. Their backs were to me. “Well, I’m just going to check out the view. You guys have a nice day,” I told her.
“You too,” she said; I was already walking. “Sorry to bother you!”
I felt vaguely guilty for not having been more talkative. I think she just wanted a civilized conversation in the park, but all I could supply was a fabricated persona. Such offhanded deception was not a behavior I wanted to continue. The stowaway squirmed again in the center of my chest, and I wondered what it might have to do with the lies.
Further toward the cliffs, details of the tall chain-link perimeter fence came into view. It was at least eight feet in height, supported by round steel posts with domed caps. These contrasted with the phalanx of barbs that comprised the top edge of the chain-link meshing. Both were painted a dark green, which enhanced the brightness of the red and white signs. Beyond the fence was the undulating horizon: the wrinkled tops of green hills and the cloudless blue sky.
To the east, the fence continued straight into the high brick wall of a large residential property adjacent to the park, with the same canyon view from its backyard. The other half of the fence, overlooking the incline of Arrow Trail Drive, appeared to have been moved back from the cliff by irregular increments at some of its vertical supports. This suggested a retreat from the original design, which must have been one face of a simple polygonal border—at one time, safely inside the corrugated limits of the plateau. It had probably been declared a prudent concession of valuable space; “just in case,” the designers might have said solemnly.
I came to the deepest point of the indentation, and surveyed the edge through the chain-links. Here, a large mass of the cliff had obviously fragmented and fallen from the top. To my untrained eye, there was no indication of when it might have happened; but it must have been relatively recently, judging by the thick, unweathered coat of paint on the relocated sections of fence. I wanted a closer look at the layers of soil revealed by the erosion, but I couldn’t see how to get on the other side of the barrier. Either Robert had been a nimble climber, or the opening he once used had since been closed.
The signs were easily visible from a distance; up close, they were glaring. NO TRESPASSING / VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED UNDER C.H.M.C. 31.12.8, printed in reflective paint and secured to the fence at eye level by thick, twisted wire. I looked down the length of the fence and its foreshortened series of signs. One of them stood out from the rest. It was about two thirds of the way to the far brick wall, bending slightly outward from the fence as if pushed from behind.
Each sign was fastened at its corners to the mesh of chain-link behind it. As I neared the one that caught my eye, it became apparent that something was crammed between the fence and the sign. The aluminum sheet bowed out enough for me to reach in from beneath and pinch the corner of a plastic membrane. I carefully extracted the item and unfurled it in my hands: a sealed transparent bag containing a couple of pages torn from a book of poetry, and a wad of crumpled newspaper that gave the package enough girth to be wedged tightly where I found it.
Suddenly, I had stuffed the discovery in my pocket; I was pivoting on my feet, scanning the area for watchful eyes. The young woman had abandoned her bench near the sandbox and was walking toward a bicycle rack near the parking lot—where there was a payphone.
I half considered fleeing from sight, but there was nowhere to go except back across the park to my car. Then a cooling breeze of rationality came over me, and I decided it had just been an excited twinge of paranoia brought on by the surreal intrigue of what I was doing. I started calmly back the way I had come, as if I had satisfied my dull interest in the view and was now distracted with the usual thoughts of a prospective homeowner.
I will not say the charade became less distasteful, but it grew easier to use as a vehicle; the shell of my invented identity, I imagined, shielded my vulnerable true self from the mysterious atmosphere of Chaparral Heights. And after all, was it such a heinous offense? I had no desire to meddle in the affairs of the community. I merely wished to come and look, and leave no trace of having done so.
But with this rationalization—this forfeiture, as I now recognize it—I plowed myself deeper into the perplexing mire of dread from which I can no longer escape.
Returning to the playground, I saw the two children from the front; both looked up at me as my shadow fell into the sandbox. I came shamefully close to taking a step back, and was thankful that their mother was too far away to see my shock. I glanced in her direction; she stood at the payphone, receiver to her ear, keeping an alert but calm eye on us from across the concrete picnic area.
The children’s physical characteristics were unlike any I had seen or heard of before—at least, not at these proportions. Conscientiously sheltered by soft fishing caps, their bulbous, hairless heads tapered directly into narrow torsos. Their legs were barely long enough to support upright sitting, and their miniature shoes lolled askew over feet that weren’t entirely there. Blood vessels and even shadows of bone were visible through the translucent flesh of their rudimentary arms; they manipulated their playthings with only the merest buds of fingers.
But it was their faces that froze me, and drew the connection in my mind—the eyes most especially. They weren’t so much eyes as they were seeds of eyes, just cloudy black discs bulging under transparent skin, not eyelids, and showing no conclusively human attributes. Other facial features were similarly inchoate—lipless, toothless slits for mouths, nostrils that were no more than dimples under vague insinuations of noses. A basic knowledge of human development offers one reference for comparison, something on a much smaller scale . . . .
Startling me even further, one of them spoke in a tiny voice. “Why bury?” he asked, and his brother echoed, “Why bury.” They were engaged in a collaborative dig; I looked at the sand in front of them and saw nothing in any state of burial.
“Why bury, Emmew?” With an awful thrust of his little arm, the one on the right pointed to something behind me, to the fence—to the sign I had just visited. “Emmew,” he repeated, apparently amused by the sound. I was petrified. What could he have said, if not my first name?
“Why bury!” the sibling rejoined, drumming his stubby legs against the wet sand.
Their mother was hanging up the phone as I hurried past her, back to my car and out of Arrow Trail Park. |
I was parked for about 10 minutes in the shade of a tree before the stirring in my ribcage subsided, and I was able to hold my hands relatively still. The plastic bag sat next to me in the passenger seat. I was on a quiet street full of two-story houses, near the northeastern end of the plateau where The Mesa was connected to the older part of town. In my nervous haste, I had navigated the length of the plateau to the opposite side from where I had come up.
I had forgotten about walking down Arrow Trail Drive for the moment; the mind-boggling encounter with the twins had effectively liquefied my composure. It was a wonder that I could operate the car at all. I had not been so genuinely astonished since early childhood, when reality and my imagination had not fully segregated into their respective compartments.
Why bury, Emiel?
I couldn’t think of what was buried, or where—or how in the world that child could have known my name. Robert, maybe. . . .
Peeling apart the interlocked seal of the plastic bag, I felt a corresponding rupture of the borders between territories. Like Robert’s plateau, the corrals and partitions of my mind were disintegrating; their contents bleeding together in a nebulous stew of fact, phantasm, and the nameless otherness that had infiltrated me upon my entrance into Chaparral Heights.
The two pages were slightly larger than those of a standard paperback novel, and slightly smaller than those from Robert’s journal. They were yellowed at the edges and cracking (having been folded and compressed behind the sign), and so must have come from a rather old book. The folios indicated the title, The Tunneler Below, and the author, Georg Reuter Fischer. The first sheet presented pages 23 and 24 of the volume; the second, 25 and 26.
Before anything else, I noticed an odor emanating from the open bag. To my knowledge, I have never smelled rancid raisins, but that’s what came to mind when I held the bag under my nose. Then I remembered what Robert had written about his bewildering time in the dark, about the sticky resin covering the stones. “Bad pancake syrup” was how he described it. I stared at the wad of newspaper and shuddered to think of where it might have been; what stain it might carry and potentially transmit. I resealed the bag and looked at the pages in my hands.
On page 23 was an outlandish sonnet entitled “The Green Deeps,” of which the following non-consecutive quatrains were enclosed in unsteady rectangles of blue pencil: |
And Vale Nath, vast ossuary bin
Below whose bones the Bholes defy decay;
Intelligence doth grow itself within
The coral-palled, squat towers of Rulay. |
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The rampant dragon dreams in far Cathay
While snake-limbed Cutlu sleeps in deep Rulay.
The cornerstones of vanished Mu lay still
Upon the ocean floor, and stay they will. |
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Most of the names were meaningless to me, except Cathay, which is an old name for China; and Mu, the mythical civilization of the Pacific, whose final remnants supposedly carved the giant heads at Easter Island. I supposed the other names could have been in reference to similar, if more obscure, antiquities. Poetry and ancient history were two subjects I never found very satisfying, as both involved a great deal of subjective interpretation. It seemed unlikely that I would find any useful significance in the abstract verse before me. I read on doubtfully.
The next two pages, facing each other, shared a longer exertion called “Carving The Gate Of Dreams,” in which the poet wistfully regarded his father’s guidance in terms of decorative masonry. None of it was marked.
Finally, page 26 featured “Sea Tombs,” another cryptic ode to things submarine and subterranean, with these four lines circled in blue: |
Their spires underlie our deepest graves;
Lit are they by a light that man has seen.
Only the wingless worm can go between
Our daylight and their vault beneath the waves. |
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Having obeyed my vague sense of duty to read all three poems closely, I sighed, returned the pages to the bag (postponing breathing until it was closed), and was left with no idea of where to go from there. The thought of going back to Arrow Trail Park repulsed me—not because the children frightened me, but because I had made a fool of myself and rudely blew past their mother in my inexplicable shock; I would owe them an apology if I went back and saw them again. I would have to weave it into my web of pretense.
No. There must have been something else pointing to the next clue. Something obvious. Something I already knew, but couldn’t dislodge from the thickening swamp of my memories—as if I could distinguish a memory from a dream or a delusion anymore.
Those poor kids . . . .
What was buried? Did they think I buried it?
Bones, coral, dragons, snakes, stones.
Sunken cities; worms in the light.
Bad pancake syrup.
I decided the key to my next step was the book, The Tunneler Below by Georg Reuter Fischer. My train of thought started off in a skeptical direction. Would the book be buried? What purpose would that serve? And how much should I ponder the words of small children in parks? The chances that Robert somehow trained them to deliver a message “when Emiel goes to the sign” . . . .
But something tickled between my lungs, and the old universe’s probabilities were no longer relevant. I knew I had been initiated into a reality where the rules were in constant flux; where solid ground was there one moment and gone the next. There was no reason to doubt that it might work in reverse: anything gone away might show up again. To be and not to be at the same time, measured blindly in water or in sand.
why bury why bury whyburywhyburywhybury . . . whybury
The cheerful, malformed children knew nothing of what was buried under Chaparral Heights. They hadn’t been saying “why bury” at all. |
The older section of town occupied the hills on the north side of The Mesa, and was connected along the ridgeline by two lanes called Chaparral Heights Boulevard. A series of tall arc lights bent over the road from the single sidewalk on the west side (the east side could also accommodate pedestrians, but was not paved). Cross-streets led downhill on both sides, into residential lanes and a couple of small shopping centers.
I stopped into a liquor store to ask directions; the hairy, listless man behind the counter told me I was headed the right way. I reemerged and spotted my objective a few blocks ahead, peeking from a cluster of treetops at the highest point of the ridge.
The roof of the Chaparral Heights Public Library was clad in hundreds of pale red Spanish tiles, curving into each other, locking into neat rows like scales on the hide of an enormous fish. Shadows filled the deep overhang of the entrance, supported at the outer edge of the roof with ornate wooden columns. The building was garnished with a profusion of plants both indigenous and exotic; a quartz gravel pathway weaved between them. This garden was in turn surrounded by the palisade of trees. I wondered how they admitted enough sunlight to fuel the bounteous flora below.
I locked my car, walked across the sun-baked asphalt, and into the cool air of the shaded garden. I passed between two wooden columns carved with spiraling flutes and knot designs, carefully stained and bleached for a subtle effect. Two sets of thick glass double-doors formed a transparent vestibule, through which I could dimly see light fixtures hanging on long chains from the ceiling, an indistinct design on the far wall, and the free-standing handrail of a staircase leading down from the entrance.
A black rubber mat signaled the outer doors to swing open like arms to gather me inside. The inner doors were likewise automated, and I stepped through their arch into a gentle turbulence of air conditioning that was alternately sterile and musty in my nostrils.
The main chamber of the library was hexagonal, with about half of its volume sunk under the ground level of the entrance. The lower level was arrayed with bookshelves in spokes reminiscent of a snowflake, an appropriate use of the space. At the center was a raised hexagonal desk surrounding an empty swivel chair, one section of the contiguous counter left open on its hinges by the absent librarian.
The upper level echoed the six-sided form of the central desk: a walkway occupying the six inner walls, connected to the bottom floor by three staircases and an elevator. There were no windows anywhere, and daylight entering through the glass doors behind me was curiously muted. The hanging electric fixtures provided only a soft, generalized ambience; smaller lamps were mounted for reading among the shelves, and the three walls without staircases were lined with small, individually lit cubicles.
Like the park, only more perfectly so, the library was deserted. The people of Chaparral Heights apparently had money and resources to spend on such improvements, but not much practical use for them. I circled the upper level and saw no one from any vantage point. I descended the main staircase into the colder, heavier air at the bottom.
“Is anyone here?” I called as unloudly as possible, not wanting to violate library etiquette. Twice, and there was no response. I sought out the restrooms, thinking the librarian might be just out of earshot, but the men’s room was empty and my knock on the women’s door accomplished nothing. I decided to mind my own business for the moment and try to find a copy of The Tunneler Below.
At the base of each set of stairs was a bay of two or three computers, each with an amber monochrome screen displaying an interface for searching the public library system. But I was drawn to the prodigious card catalog nearer the center of the floor, in a wide cabinet full of long, narrow drawers on each side. I found that the wood was decorated with the same thematic carvings that were on the columns outside.
It was increasingly evident that these premises were conceived and constructed with early, astute consideration for everything that was now inside. There was a pervasive spirit of brooding intelligence here. The staff desk in the center of the floor was the focal point of a concentric system, reaching out through the walls to the tightly-spaced ring of trees surrounding the garden. Under different circumstances, I would have liked to study a copy of the floor plan. Even a guided tour might have been interesting.
Another appraisal of my surroundings reinforced the fact that I was still alone. I blatantly cleared my throat several times, browsing across rows and columns of drawers indexed in the Dewey decimal system. The library’s collection was impressive in sheer volume; I looked over my shoulders at the dozens of shelves stacked and crowded with books of all kinds. I wondered when the library had first opened. For a public place, it was certainly a well-kept secret—but then, so was all of Chaparral Heights.
I pulled open a drawer labeled TI–TY and walked my fingers along the uneven tops of the cards . . . and there it was. The Tunneler Below by Georg Reuter Fischer, 1936 first edition, Ptolemy Press. It was categorized as both poetry and fiction. I noted the index number and slid the drawer back into its burrow.
Book categories were arranged in wedge-shaped zones around the center; the inward ends of the bookshelves presented a circle of tastefully hand-painted signs to indicate the contents of each aisle. I made my way around the platform of the hexagonal desk and between two walls of books. They were immaculately ordered, something that was rare in my experience with public libraries.
I quickly found a weird group of titles, of which The Tunneler Below was perhaps the least crawlingly suggestive: Azathoth and Other Horrors, Thus Spake the Wyrm, Legion Young of the Black Goat and several more, all by different authors. I was already a foreigner in this eerie diorama of a city; I was in no mood to grapple with fantastic names and occult imagery, whatever components of understanding might be parsed from its garish jargon.
Still, I removed The Tunneler from the shelf and flipped it open in my palm. It naturally parted at the most tired crease of its narrow old spine, revealing two serrated stubs where page 22 proceeded directly to page 27. On the latter I could plainly see linear impressions corresponding with the pencil marks on the removed pages.
One of the shelf-lamps was a few steps to my right. I shuffled my feet in that direction and something slipped from the back of the book; it fell to the floor and scattered behind me in two pieces: a sheet of paper folded haphazardly into quarters, and a Polaroid photograph that landed face-down.
I remember a sudden churning of the air, as if a frenzy of hummingbirds had materialized above me. In that instant I was already in the act of stooping over, dangling my free hand toward the fugitive artifacts— |
Then I was looking at the dashboard gauges of my car.
I was breathing shallowly, with beads of sweat rolling down my face and everywhere else. The windows were closed tight, trapping the heat of the afternoon sun. The library’s parking lot was now occupied by several additional vehicles, whereas I had arrived alone—when the sun was higher, not in my eyes. I opened the door and felt the mugginess of the interior flush out around me, then a hilltop breeze that swiftly revived my senses from their wilted condition. I didn’t seem to be injured, drugged, or otherwise tampered-with.
Pulling myself out of the car, I staggered upright and tugged at my shirt to circulate air inside the damp fabric. The breeze died down, and in the following stillness it occurred to me to check my inventory. I bent over and peered into my car, at the passenger seat, at the floor in front of it—the dashboard—the driver seat—the back seat. I lunged inside and rooted through every crevice. I slid both seats forward and back. I yanked open the glove compartment and quickly punctured one of my ransacking fingers on a hidden toothpick.
With the finger in my mouth, I slouched in the driver seat and smoldered. It was unfair. The plastic bag, the poetry and the pungent wad of newsprint were nowhere to be found.
I had nothing to show for the tremulous time I had already spent in Chaparral Heights—except my arrival at the library, which could have been explained by its prominence as a local landmark. Even the alien gurgle in my chest seemed to be a residual impression rather than a presence, like the ghosted grooves dragged across page 27 of The Tunneler Below.
A phrase from Robert’s journal came to me: “Maybe it had already done its job, bringing me this far.” He had theorized more readily that there was some curtained orchestration of events in Chaparral Heights. My imagination convulsed with scenarios: was it a skulking conspiracy of unreceptive locals? some terrifying perversion of random chance? one ubiquitous, supernatural will?
The most acceptable explanation, of course, would be that I was suffering a psychotic break. Brought on by stress, let’s say, and an unhealthy inclination toward unwholesome daydreaming. Was this what happened to Robert? The thought made me angry, and my tourist’s passivity started to boil away. I was determined to recover my evidence.
I should have identified the entire episode as a dispassionate warning, one last chance to cringe and slink away, back to the mundane life from whence I came, to content myself with the flimsy peace of denial. But my emotions had been too riled; they twisted the admonition into an insult—an undermining mockery of Emiel Walden and his blundering, pointless quest.
Indignant, I tensed my shoulders, scraped together my bravado, and eyed the cars and minivans parked irregularly across the lot. The shadowed library entrance gaped beneath the canopy of tiles. Armed only with ignorance, I charged headlong into the finality of my entrapment. |
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