[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

After leaving men to watch the cave entrance, and sending another couple of his men into town to see if there was a quiet way to get some information about the caves and other features of the ridge-area, Conners and Howard Lake made their way back to the clearing with the burned house.

Let us take a closer look.

As Nathan and Howard emerged into the clearing again, a faint mist resumed falling.
The on-again, off-again rain was more annoying than anything else, but it did add to
the general disgruntlement Nathan felt about losing track of LeMoine.

“I don’t like this clearing,” Howard said softly, as he and his chief walked over to
the remains of the house and its odd stone companion. “I don’t know why, I can’t
put my finger on it, but there’s something about it that gives me the creeps.”

Nathan looked in surprise at his friend. Howard Lake was the last person that he
would have expected to hear express a thought like that, in that tone. The chief
science and engineering man of the Seven Aces tended, if anything, to being more
pragmatic and prosaic than necessary.

Still…“I sort of know what you mean,” Nathan admitted. “It’s not quite…right.”

The old stone foundation was normal enough. It looked much like the sort of
work that underlay houses from the Colonial period, or before. Nathan had no
doubt that the house had been built at least a century or more before he was
born, possibly a century and a half before his birth.

Heck, it might go back to Dutch times, Nathan mused. Still, this is kind of
an odd place for it. All by itself on top this ridge, this would be a poor place for a
farm, the soil is shallow and rocky and the house would be exposed to the elements
here. I could maybe see somebody coming along later and building the house here
for the view, but there isn’t much view from this spot, either. You can’t see over
the north side to the river from here, and on the other side it’s not that impressive.

Nathan shook his mind out of his musings as he and Howard approached the stone
object. It became obvious that whatever it was, it probably was not a grave marker.

The object was a six-sided obelisk or tower, cut out of local stone, and sunk into
the shallow local soil. The sides were not quite polished, but someone had worked
on them to make them relatively smooth. Nathan realized that his first guess about
its height was probably an underestimate, he now guessed it to be at least ten yards
in height, and about two yards thick where it went into the ground.

“Somebody went to an awful lot of work to put this thing up,” Howard observed,
as the two men reached the base, which simply rose out of the ground. There was
no sign of a separate foundation or wide underlying structure, it was as if someone
had simply driven the stone object into the ground like some huge spike.

“I’ll bet they cut a hole for it, in the bedrock, too,” Howard added. “Otherwise, I
don’t see how this thing could stand for long, and it’s been here for a long time.
So that’s even more effort.”

“What makes you so sure it’s been here for a long time?”

“Look at the markings, Chief,” Howard replied. “They’re worn down, eroded, I
doubt they were cut to look the way they do. This thing is made of kind of soft rock,
but it would still take a long time for wind and rain to soften the marking the way
they are. I can’t imagine this thing has been standing here for less than…oh, maybe
a century. Something like that, anyway.”

“Unless somebody moved this thing here from somewhere else,” Nathan pointed
out. “It could have eroded before it was brought here.”

“Could be,” Howard replied, sounding doubtful. “But look the ground around it.
It’s settled, tightly packed and overgrown with grass. This thing has been standing
here for years, at least.”

“If so, then somebody’s at least been keeping this clearing open,” Nathan replied.
“Otherwise it would be overgrown with young trees.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Howard replied, as he examined the markings on the tower.

All six ‘sides’ of the object were marked, incised deeply with symbols that were
like no letters familiar to Nathan. The language (assuming the markings meant
anything at all, he reminded himself) were not only not in English or any other
language Nathan could read, but did not even look like any alphabet he had seen.
The markings were in rows and columns running up and down the sides, apparently
all the way to the top, where the six sides gave way to a four-sided pyramidal peak.

“Can you make any sense of it, Howie?”

“No,” Howard replied. “It’s not language I know, including the Atlantean forms
I’m familiar with. Not that that proves anything, I only know a little bit of the
Atlantean written language. There are some shapes that look sort of familiar,
though. Not enough that I can say anything useful about.”

“Surely whoever carved on this thing didn’t expect it to be read from the ground,”
Nathan observed, as he walked around the base. “But we need to make a few
discreet inquiries with the locals, before we get carried away. They have to
know about this, it might be no mystery at all if we just knew who to ask.”

Nathan paused, because he had found something different on the western side.

“Howie, take a look at this!”

Howard came around, to see what Nathan was pointing at. There, at about eye level,
on the west-facing facet of the obelisk, someone had carved away the original writing
and replaced it, over an area of about one square foot, with much newer markings,
in familiar lettering. It was not in any familiar language, however. Still, at the bottom
of the new writing was one quite readable marking, cut into the rock: ‘3-8-1903’.

“Well, well, well,” Howard said. “What have we here?”


For now, we must leave Howard Lake and his question, so that we can turn our attention elsewhere.

MORE LATER.