“Mr. Burnkey, It’s Ned Ralston, special agent FBI Western Bureau, I am calling to thank you for your information in the Clifton Johns cult murders. It was a bizarre story for sure and had our agents combing through some numerical reading for some time and then through some underground sites as well. Your tips on the locations of the bodies were quite helpful and were confirmed by our experts. We uncovered four other bodies: One in a Chicago sub-basement near the Coyote building, one in a rain-water sewer tunnel near the other Minneapolis free-mason temple, The Crow Creek Indian Reservation in South Dakota conducted their own search and found the third body in a missile silo with a similar M.O. to your case and finally we learned that the Salina, Kansas body had been discovered years ago and had been buried locally. The body was exhumed and returned to Minneapolis. We weren’t, however, able to discover the whereabouts of the body that you suggested would be in a Columbia, Missouri missile silo because all the silos in that area had been dismantled or were clean. The body was probably lost in the dismantling process. We want to thank you, Mr. Burnkey, it’s lucky hobbyists like yourself that sometimes make real contributions to cases like this one. We’d like to offer you a citation when you return to Boston. Please call me then. Oh, our math experts also want to thank you. They said something about your findings being arithmetically brilliant. They are prone to excitability, though. Math types often are. Good day.”
We drove east from Austin in silence. A few days had passed since the discovery of the Morton Petes master-con. We had managed not to get caught after breaking into the morgue and even got out with print-outs of the ‘death’ scenes. After that, we had to keep a low profile, but soon ran out of leads on the man called Phillip. We had learned so much so quickly and so much of it affected the truth about who we were. In fact, it affected who we’d become and how we'd seen the world and would effect everything from this point forward. Mostly I felt like a victim.
“Why are we heading east?” Polly whispered.
“Well, there is nothing left to learn in Austin, so I thought I’d at least head in the direction of home. My home, that is. Which reminds me …”
“If it was up to me, I would have just hung tight in Austin. Knowing that Jacob Phillips faked his death has had a positive effect on my outlook. Yes, he was a sick bastard, but at least the nightmares and the damage that he’s caused are over.”
“The damage that he, Morton Petes, caused me is far from over. Everything that I’ve gone through for the past three years, everything that I’ve lost and believed and suffered through was because of this person. I am not feeling like forgiving and I know that I’ll never forget.”
The steering wheel creaked. The noise gave away the reality of just how hard I’d been pulling on it. All that had been confusion and guilt in myself was being converted to a new energy. It felt warm inside me if not altogether healthy. I finally had a purpose. All that remained was to have a direction. East felt right for now.
We drove on most of the day, and eventually green highway signs for St. Louis appeared. The number of miles to the city dropped in a very predictable way as the Mustang defiantly rolled on, despite its age and my selfish disregard for its care.
St. Louis - 97 miles
Polly reminded me that I had my health.
St. Louis - 70 miles
Polly said that we are “all in this together.”
St. Louis - 45 miles
Polly offered that “violence doesn’t solve anything.”
St. Louis - 35 miles
I reminded Polly that one of the reasons that I’d appreciated her along this journey was because she never spouted clichés.
St. Louis - 15 miles
Polly mentioned that she was looking forward to seeing the St. Louis arch. She mentioned that it was one of the few national monuments that was feminine. She said it was unique from the Washington monument, for example, which clearly "had something to prove." Then she fell asleep.
I saw the city skyline and the famous (feminine) arch from a distance, hazy and wobbling in the humidity. It was a beautifully simple structure that improved upon a simple landscape. I leaned over to awaken Polly, but as I did I realized something wasn’t right. My body was feeling uneasy in an all too familiar way. I took the next exit and found myself in downtown St. Louis.
I found a parking space and got out of the car to get some air. Then, standing next to the Mustang, something happened that hadn’t happened in over a month, not since Colorado. I began to see a vision without trying to. My pattern sense once again presented a vision of me leaving the ground. I floated up above the arch and above the state until a giant red glowing hexagon appeared. This time, though, the shape fell down near the arch and not west as it had before. As I returned to earth, an image began to flash over the other, it was the face of that bastard Morton Petes and his one open all-seeing eye. It must have been a holdover from my previous preoccupation. When I suddenly felt the ground beneath me again, I heaved with nausea, but managed to contain my fast food lunch. Polly was holding me.
“Are you OK, Theo?”
For the first time since I’d met her I really held her in return and it felt like something I should have done sooner. I’d thought that the uncontrolled manifestation of the pattern sense had ended. I thought that things had solidified and that my only enemies were the ones outside of me, enemies like Morton Petes. Feeling the way that I did made me question what was true. It was nice to have someone solid and real around me. She had been there for me for quite a while now. I may have even gotten used to her. She had, despite her quirks, undeniably improved my life out here in America.
“Why’d you freak out, math-boy?”
Her timing was always perfect.
“Polly, I’ve felt this way before.” And then I told her all about Clifton Johns. When I was finished she thought for a little while.
“You know, Theo, you never struck me as crazy. Not once. You just seem a little bit uptight at times. You have a real gift, you know. Figuring out the best way to use it is all that you have to worry about. Not getting it perfect every time. As far as I’m concerned, just by leaving home, you did the right thing. After that decision, everything else is good just because you’re trying.”
Then Polly started walking down the sidewalk and looking to her left. As she did, her eyes got wide.
“Holy crap! Theo, you’ve got to see this!”
I also began to move down the sidewalk, the parking meters on my right, Polly a few feet ahead, and then I saw what she was so surprised to see. I felt the surprise myself. The six story tan brick building to my right, gradually showed its other side as we walked. The other side, surrounded by a parking lot, was some sort of gigantic art sculpture of some sort. A metal infrastructure held, suspended above the parking area, two full-sized airplane bodies, a fire truck and a domed gazebo. Eight stories up, a school bus was teetering off the edge of the building. The entire infrastructure was attached to the building. On top of the building a gigantic preying mantis was also looking down at us.
“There are people crawling around up there!” Polly shouted.
As we walked closer we saw what seemed to be a gigantic playground. Picture the jungle gym from your childhood days, only magnified by ten and with all the corners replaced with the vehicles of your adulthood.
“It’s called The City Museum!” Polly added, rapidly acquiring knowledge as she moved. I, personally, was still feeling a little nauseous, and not entirely in the mood for more surprises. But I had to admit that the place was amazing. We finally found the front door, after walking past a pit full of plastic balls, only inhabited by adults throwing the balls at each other nearly as hard as they could.
We walked into the doorway and were met by a tiled archway with mosaic patterns in its floor and unique wall coverings on every wall you could see. The ticketing building seemed to have once been a free-standing stone building that had been positioned elsewhere. Now it was here in this confusing building. I walked to a ticket window and a man with short hair welcomed us.
“Hello and welcome to The City Museum, my name is Nick.”
“Hello, Nick, that’s an amazing playground you have out there!” Polly squealed.
“Thanks, but there is even more inside. In fact, there are three stories of caves, tunnels, aquariums and slides for you to enjoy, although none of what you see was built to be here.”
“How is that?” I finally spoke.
“Every piece of building material that you see here was reclaimed from another location. Just as it was dying in its old life, it was becoming a new building block in our world. Our owner, whose proud innovation and art piece this entire building is, is on a list of a few people that are called, sometimes only twenty-four hours before demolition to claim whatever they want from a structure.”
As Nick said this, I started to feel nauseous again. I started to feel myself float into the an uninitiated sensory episode, a single image flashed to me, it was a life-sized winged gargoyle posed in a crouch, then the episode passed. I leaned against the counter until my head cleared.
“Are you OK, sir?”
Polly approached the counter and whispered something to the man. His face changed expressions several times as I could only guess what she was saying to him.
“Wow, really?” he said to her as he made a sad expression toward me, “Would you both like a guided tour?” Then he whispered to Polly, “Seeing as it’s so serious.”
I checked my watch and then agreed, with my silence, to take the tour. The building was once a shoe factory, and some of what was originally in it had been reclaimed to form several stories of man made caves. Everywhere the creator had had a chance, he’d carved some sort of mythical beast or giant animal. Dinosaurs, whales, dragons, lions and snakes were embedded in many of the walls. We also walked through an aquarium and a museum of reclaimed architectural relics. It was in the room where relics were found that I saw several items that I’d grown to recognize from around America, and especially Chicago and Minneapolis, where I’d been so interested in architecture and symbols.
Our tour of the museum, that Polly had no doubt secured with a fabulous tale of my upcoming demise, lasted about twenty minutes. I had become anxious to return to the road and to get on with the associated ill feelings. As we walked near the door to exit, I noticed a brochure for the place and on it was the gargoyle from my vision. Maybe I had just been looking at the hand-out when I had my vision earlier, but I had to be sure.
I raised my hand a bit to get Nick’s attention and then asked, “Nick, is this gargoyle somewhere on the building?”
“Ah, yes, it’s on the third floor near a corner of new construction. We missed it. I’m sorry about that.”
He didn’t seem to be offering to trudge all the way back up the stairs, but somehow I felt that it was important to see it.
“The third floor?” I asked and made a slightly pathetic expression.
“Yes. Would you like to go up and take a look?”
“I think I should,” I replied as I saw Polly turn to look suddenly surprised at my interest in the place.
We all walked back up to the third floor and toward a back, poorly lit corner with construction tape surrounding it. As I approached the giant green metal gargoyle my senses began to react again. Where I’d stopped walking, the eyes in its large beaked face seemed to look right at me. I held steady, though, and approached the creature. There was nothing around it. No symbols on it, no door beneath it. No all-seeing eyes or letter G’s. But then I noticed an oddly shaped shadow near the corner and poked my head deeper behind the creature. A small tunnel led away in the darkness. The hole, only a few feet tall, was cut into the side of a wall that seemed to bow outward like a castle turret.
“A tunnel.”
“Yes,” Nick managed, “tunnels are everywhere here at the City Museum …”
But I was already on my hands and knees heading down it. I crawled for something like ten feet before I emerged into an area filled with work lights and scaffolding and something in the center that was very familiar. My body reacted as I saw a door torn from my memories in Colorado. The museum had salvaged a missile silo door and chamber. It was directly in front of me and as I looked at the portion that had been claimed, I saw numbers and letters painted in red all around it. The writing was unmistakable, it had been reclaimed from one of the Clifton Johns locations. Etched into the door, above the combination knob, were the words “Columbia Titan IV.”
“This area is under construction,” the newly arrived Nick reported. “Sir, you need to get out of here.”
“Nick, could you please give Theo a second? I think he knows this door.”
“My boss hasn’t been able to open it yet.”
Ignoring the voices, I stood wondering if the insides were still intact, and if that meant that one of the six dead free-masons would be inside. I looked on the ground and saw the hint that Johns had left amid all of the nonsense numbers and letters. AIITBIIECII. I turned the combination to the familiar Pythagorean digits three, four, five. The door didn’t open. I tried the next Pythagorean integer set six, eight and ten and that didn’t work either. Nick looked at me doubtfully. I envisioned the perfect Pythagorean integer triangle floating in front of me as I closed my eyes and saw one other basic permutation, a triangle with sides five and twelve and thirteen. (13 squared or 169 less 5 squared or 25 gave 144 whose square root was an even 12.) I tried the combination and at first the door resisted, then swung open to the encased chamber. I held my breath before looking deeper inside, not feeling up to beholding another pitiful corpse. What I saw was a chamber that was again painted with numbers and letters but was, fortunately, empty. As I turned to look at the back of the door, a message had been written, this time in a darker red that was possibly blood.
The sighted are blind,
and will go to hell with a sense
for the pattern of death they’ve brought
in their arrogance.
But I
am free.
The sixth member of the Clifton Johns cult didn’t die. He solved the Pythagorean riddle and escaped. The feeling was a relief, but somehow not a complete one. After all, wasn’t I technically one of the sighted?
Nick thanked me for opening the door, saying that his boss would be grateful. I told him that he should probably call the FBI before making the chamber open to the public. Then Polly and I made our way, again, toward the exit. This time as we walked to the doorway, I noticed that the railing on the stairs was designed like a snake. It triggered another, separate, thought. I hurried to the car as Polly thanked Nick.
In the car, I shuffled through papers as I started the laptop. It powered up as I found the photo of the bogus Peter Jacobs death scene. There above the head of the body which was meant to have been shot through the head, was a painting that had been in my mind since I’d first seen it. The snake in the city museum had made me think of it again, but now in the context of Morton Petes. It was an oroboros. A snake that formed a circle by being in the act of biting its own tail. It illustrated an endless cycle. A circular path.
The laptop was now ready and I powered up the standard census database. On a hunch that Morton Petes in his new incarnation as Phillip might be seeing the tail of his cycle, I search for the name Phillip Mort (letting the computer find any name that started with the first four letters.) I look up to Polly.
“What is it?”
“I found him.”
There on the screen was the name Phillip Morté, and he was last registered to live in Athens, Georgia. Somehow the comparison to a snake seemed apt. I hoped to catch the reptile before he got to strike and run again.
“I guess we’re off to Georgia,” I said as the impact of the route hit my stomach. Someone out there hoped that my sighted self would go to hell. On top of that, we’d pass through Memphis which was the current home of my former wife Chloe. The Mustang was going to need more gas.
Morton sat in his room watching the hacking program work at the police database. It had tried thirty-three percent of the possible realistic combinations of passwords for the usernames he had derived from the "staff" section of the website. It wouldn't take too much longer for him to be into the police database and when he was, he'd be ready to continue the cycle.
The apartment that he chose in each town was in a critical location. It was on the line between police jurisdictions. This was important because when he made the claim that Phillip had died in one, and then reported it to the other, the precinct that got the report would just trust that the other had checked everything out. In truth, though, no police would ever have gone to his house. He knew that the computer records meant much more than what actually happened.
He looked up at the painting above his bed. The oroboros was the perfect symbol for his existence, he thought. Both because of the cycle that he was about to complete, and because of the teeth within the snake's mouth. The teeth pointed to possibilities.
He took out a pair of scissors and then his driver's license. He looked at the photo and the name: Phillip Morté. Then he cut the ID directly through the photo of his own face. Or was it Morton's face? It didn't really matter, no one noticed anyway.
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