Chapter 91 - The Descent to the Wellhead
It was not a weapon. It was not a vault of stolen gold, nor a hidden stockpile of black-budget military ordnance.
It was an obelisk of obsidian-black material, twelve feet tall, suspended completely motionless in mid-air six inches above a polished bronze dais. No cables held it. No magnetic coils were visible. It hovered with an absolute, terrifying weight, vibrating with a frequency so deep that Jared felt it not in his ears, but in the marrow of his femur bones.
Surrounding the floating obelisk was a circular ring of brass machinery, built with the familiar, rugged craftsmanship of Arthur Vancell. It was a massive harness of copper cooling pipes, heavy-duty marine alternators, diesel-powered grounding relays, and thousands of hand-soldered resistors, all wired together to form a gigantic physical governor.
Arthur hadn't built the anomaly. He had lassoed it.
He had built a mechanical harness around an alien engine to keep it asleep.
Jared walked slowly toward the control desk set ten feet from the dais. On the metal console, laid out neatly between two industrial grease guns, was a yellowed spiral notebook.
On the cover, written in his grandfather’s rough, heavy block letters, were the words:
*TO JARED. ONLY JARED.*
His hands trembling slightly, Jared opened the front cover.
*Jared,* the handwriting read, dated August 14, 1999:
*If you are reading this, your mother has probably tried to sell the timber, and Melissa has probably grown up to be exactly what I feared she would be—someone who looks at the world and sees only things to consume.*
*I found this thing in the mine shaft in 1962 when we were driving the lower drift for the zinc company. The government wanted to dig it out. They brought in eggheads from MIT and generals from the Pentagon. They ran two tests on it, and both times, every transformer within forty miles blew out, and three men lost their minds from the resonance.*
*They wanted to destroy it with a nuclear warhead. I told them they were idiots. You don't hit a sleeping bear with a hammer.*
*I bought the deed. I paid off the inspectors. I spent forty years building the dampener array. It feeds on bloodline harmony, Jared. Don't ask me how. The machine doesn't read codes; it reads the bio-electric field of the operator. When I die, it will wake up unless an heir of my blood, who understands the meaning of hard work and quiet duty, takes my place.*
*Do not let them turn it off. If it wakes fully, the tectonic plate will slide seventy feet to the west.*
May you like
*Protect Noah. Protect Ellie. They are the only clean blood left.*
*Love, Grandfather Arthur.*
