– Hart [County], mounds near Green river &c. mummies in caves
– Indiana, towns and mounds on the Wabash …
— Catalogue of “Sites of Ancient Towns and Monuments of Kentucky, &c.” by C.S. Rafinesque
“There’s the sigil — keep singing!” Sam shouted, madly pounding the tuning fork. “Sienna, that’s a D4. We need a C4. You’re interfering with the waveform!”
“Why the hell did you bring her?” the fairy asked, her holographic image flickering in the misty air of Rafinesque Hall.
Phiale was relieved to see Tinker Bell still had her sense of humor, if that’s what it was, as the girl held her own middle C steady — “oooooh … ” But Phiale couldn’t quite match Thalia’s clear, foundational tone.
The note reverberated through the limestone chamber, sustaining a double-helix standing wave that stretched from Mammoth Cave toward wherever Gabriel was holding Tinker Bell. It was definitely outside New Harmony; the fairy had lost her magic.
Sam took advantage of the Green River’s negative ions coursing overhead and the Styx flowing beneath them. Ancient mounds along both the Green and Wabash acted as nodal amplifiers, phase-locking the region’s telluric waves with the combined singing, bounded by the minds of Tinker Bell and her two ancient guardians.
The sound vibrations in the cavern cracked loose a three-foot stalactite, which plummeted 40 feet, missing Sienna by inches and kicking up a thick cloud of dusty guano from a colony of Corynorhinus rafinesquii — Rafinesque’s big-eared bats. She scratched her nose, eyes widening in panic.
She’s going to sneeze, Phiale thought. I knew she was going to screw this up. I just didn’t know how.
A glowing hexagon appeared behind Tinker Bell’s translucent form, followed by twelve spokes, nested triangles and a rosette of six yellow petals. The pattern pulsed in time with Windi’s egg costume, and Phiale’s mind flashed on Persephone gathering daffodils just before the ground opened — her scream fading as she descended —
Sienna’s whole body was twitching now. Sam raised his camera to get a photo of the sigil.
Then came the girl’s loud, nasal, goose-like honks.
The standing wave shattered.
***
Driving back up I-165, Sam suddenly remembered something from 1818 (drinking from Mnemosyne can have that effect).
Caught Audubon going through my knapsack, the varmint … need to cache the Walam Olum glyphs … just auger out a compartment on the underside of his new millstone … seal it back up with lime putty … ”
A depository of the countryside’s standing wave patterns, the glyphs even happened to be on the way home, still hidden in the stone, on public display at Audubon Mill Park.
***
Two days later, Sam was bent over the vibrating membrane of a 1964 Hans Jenny tonoscope, painstakingly tracing a template from one of the glyphs.
Di tapped the red cedar tablet with strange carvings and precisely painted geometrical forms, darkened with age and cracked. “Lucky I knew someone with the Henderson Police,” she said.
“Yes, I admit the chiseling was a bit suspicious,” Sam said distractedly. “But all that’s over now. They let us go, and we found what we needed.”
Sam had reserved the entire Working Men’s Institute attic that afternoon for “cymatics research.” Phiale was sitting with Windi, Sienna and Di at the Owen Round Table under the slanted ceiling with its exposed planks, taking in the room’s curiosities: crystals in glass cases, a locked safe labeled “bone fragments (giants),” Leyden jars and galvanic batteries.
The tonoscope was an interconnected contraption consisting of a speaking tube and boxes arrayed with dials and switches connected to a black rubber membrane the size of a snare drum, stretched over a metal frame.
Once Sam had traced the central rosette onto the drum, along with whatever else he could remember of the pattern that had appeared behind Tinker Bell, he covered it with a thin layer of fine sand and had Thalia sing a C4 into the tube while he drove the frame at various frequencies.
It made a lot of pretty shapes, but of little value for locating the fairy. “These harmonics just can’t pull enough resonance from the countryside,” Sam said, slumping into a chair, burying his face in his hands.
“Imagine my shock — one of your harebrained plans didn’t go right,” Di said, flipping through a copy of the Evansville Courier & Press she’d picked up on the way in through the library. (She had an unhealthy fixation with the game warden’s deer poaching violations in the Outdoor Report.)
“Wait!” Phiale said, slapping her palm down on the Farm section. A standalone photo titled “An Ear-ie Sight” showed a crop circle in a cornfield just west of Mount Vernon — taken the day of their cave rite. Its pattern featured a hexagon just inside the main circumference, surrounding a rosette with six petals, interlocking triangles — the whole deal.
“That’s it!” Sam shouted. “The full pattern was too big and bold for some Chladni plate or dank cave. We bounced that critter off the ionosphere.”
***
Leaving the Working Men’s Institute, Sam tucked the newspaper under his arm and they cut through Church Park toward Galata Antiquities to break out the protractor and old maps. The sun was shining, and Phiale felt good about their progress. Sienna meandered behind, humming as they walked past a thick row of trees … birds chirped … including a series of clear, sharp whistles.
“Ah, the alarm call of an eastern phoebe,” Sam said, “first banded by Audubon in 1804 to see if they would return to their nests the following spring. It’s also named after Artemis’ grandmother, calling out to her in more relaxed moods … fee-bee, fee-bee.”
“God, you never quit talking,” Windi said, taking a drag off a cigarette.
“That says a lot coming from you,” Di chimed in.
Phiale looked back to see if she could spot the phoebe. She couldn’t see it — or Sienna for that matter. They briefly scanned the park for her but figured she’d headed somewhere on her own. So they started off again.
After only a few steps, Phiale stopped so abruptly that Windi ran into the back of her. “What the hell?” the latter exclaimed.
“Yeah, good question,” Phiale said, watching the Smithsonian van lumber along Church Street, severely dented, its windows blackened and front bumper sticking out like a tusk. It looks like a wounded mastodon, Phiale thought. Out for blood.
Chapter 14 drops July 23. Read Part 1 on Kindle or in paperback. (Catch up with the Prologue.)
Rob Robill 