The Last Ancient will be released December 2, 2013 digitally through the Champagne Books website (champagnebooks.com) and through all major vendors: iTunes for iPad,iPod and iPhone; Amazon for Kindle; Barnes & Noble for Nook; Kobo, etc.. The print editions will follow after 100 downloads.
CHAPTER ONE
The
deer’s blood catches the golden hour light. It radiates throughout the animal’s
carcass in fall hues that reflect the island’s rustling red leaves and
honey-colored needles littering the sand. Such eerie, blasphemous beauty. I
fire shots from my Nikon.
“That’s six. Six deer mutilations this
month,” I say to my experts. Click.
Click. Click.
Branches partially cover the deer.
Its eyes are wet brown marbles rimmed and veined in burning red, as though it
had been hung upside down for a day. Its lips are peeled back above the gums in
a grimace of broken teeth. Brain matter spills through a crack in the skull. Two
yellowjackets buzz over the red pulp. Land. Feed. Hover above their feast. Click. The neck is attached to the body
by a flap of hide. One of the deer’s forelegs is missing. Inside the hole in
its torso I can see that its entrails have been removed. I get on my elbows and
snap pictures from the cold, damp sand. The heart is gone, too.
Dr. Pauline Driscoll, Nantucket’s
town biologist, is squatting beside the carcass. She’s furious at Sgt. Brad
Fernandez, who is cursing and stomp-cleaning a gore-splattered boot into the
sand. She affects his tar-thick Roxbury accent. “Nice shaht cut, ace!” Her
silvering French braid swings out the back of her UMass baseball cap as she unpacks
measuring tape, sample tubes, and baggies from her turquoise external frame
pack. Sgt. Fernadez kicks bloody goo into the bushes.
“Maybe I wanna carry da machete fuh once, Doctor Driscoll,” he says.
Dr. Driscoll mutters and scribbles
into her notepad. She is oblivious to her windswept beauty. Her dark eyes shine
and sparkle, and she’s maintained her triathlete’s figure despite being on the
other side of forty. She’s over a decade older than me, but I understand why Sgt.
Fernandez wants to impress her.
Dr. Driscoll carves out an eyeball, coaxing
it from the deer’s eye socket with a gloved hand. Tendons follow the jelly
marble from the orbital cavity like melted provolone. She saws through the tendons
with a retractable scalpel. Fernandez gags. It makes him look like a blushing Boy
Scout in his green Environmental Police uniform and billed hat and bulky black
utility belt. Driscoll smiles school-girl sweet, dropping the eyeball into a
baggie. She offers Fernandez the instrument and baggie, asking him if he’d like
to carry the scalpel for once.
Fernandez holds up one hand at her and balls
the other over his mouth, gulps twice. “You’re one sick hippy,” he says.
Driscoll hums a macabre rendition of Melanie
Safka’s Lay Down as she scoops bits
of brain from the crack in the animal’s skull.
I sniff the shrieking wind. It’s
bowing the barrens of pitch pines toward our clearing in the scrub oak like
gnarled magnetic filaments. I can smell the ocean, almost hear it, but not see
it. From our elevated bald spot in the suffocating brush, I can see the sandy
path we just traversed. It cuts like a surgical scar through the open
conservation land’s tufts of bladed grass and bristling patches of black
huckleberry and pasture rose. It winds up Altar Rock into the reddening
horizon, where a hunter stands silhouetted on the rim of the valley, binoculars
pressed to his face. The strapped shotgun jutting from his shoulder makes him
look like a fierce insect with an antenna.
“You poor baby,” says Driscoll,
passing a black fine-toothed comb over the deer’s patchy fur. She taps the comb
and a dozen ticks fall like grains of volcanic sand into a plastic dish. “Those
teeth, that pelt--man, you were one sick fella.”
Fernandez breathes, gets down on one
knee, and starts shaving samples from the spine with his own folding knife. He
then slices off chunks of muscle and organs that he places into baggies under
Driscoll’s direction. Click.
“I’m bustin’ heads, and you can
quote me on that,” says Fernandez through clenched teeth behind his trimmed
mustache. “Someone was huntin’ before dawn.”
“Or something,” I say, snapping close-ups of the spray radius. Drops of
blood shine like rubies on wooden pendants in the foreground against a hazy
cloud of thorns. The experts exchange looks and groans.
“Anyways, this is roundabouts where da
Pike brothers said dey heard something freaky ’bout an hour ago,” says
Fernandez. “Said it was like a deer cry, but kinda mutant, with loads a
struggle.”
Dr. Driscoll stands and examines the
sand and rocks for tracks. She picks up the machete she used to carve a trail here
through the scrub oak. “Man, what is wrong
with people?” she says and hacks at the thorny curtain with skills she picked
up surveying birds in the Amazon and in Africa. She asks Fernandez if he can
find any boot prints. He shakes his head.
I ask them to speculate on a
predator. No dice.
“How about speculating on how it got
in here then?” I say. “We lost the tracks and the blood trail way long ago.”
“Good point,” admits Dr. Driscoll.
The deer’s remaining foreleg
suddenly stiffens as though saluting, hitting Driscoll’s thigh.
“Oh, fuck me hard on Sunday!” says
Dr. Driscoll, jumping into Sgt. Fernandez’s arms.
He whispers, “Relax, it’s a fresh kill. And
sure, Sunday’s good for me.”
Driscoll shoves Fernandez, and says to
me, “Don’t you dare put that in the article.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say, and
try to smile. Can’t. I’m shaken.
Shotguns crow across the windswept
prairie of mid-island Nantucket. I swear and fumble my notepad. Scan the sky. Indeed,
the staccato cracks are like iron roosters. They announce a sunrise as raw and
ruddy as the November leaves rattling in their stunted trees. Twisting,
African-looking things that recall whittled broccoli dipped in flaming tar. For
hunters, the day has begun.
I gather my creased notepad and shake
the sand off the New England Daily
Tribune logo. Dr. Driscoll winks at me and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect
you.” Between machete slashes at the scrub oak and the branches covering the
carcass, she whispers about the feverish late fall and its effect on the
island’s various micro-ecologies. She rolls roots and flowers between her
fingers and tastes a wizened blueberry. Shotguns crackle from Squam Swamp
behind us. I remind her I’m not channeling John Muir for this piece no matter
how eloquent her reveries.
She slips into one anyhow. “Oh man, but
can’t you see it? The beauty? The history?” Dr. Driscoll squints, hacks at
something, and shrugs, continuing, “Wampanoag Indians shucking shellfish around
campfires.” Hack. “Quakers praying at
the meeting house.” Hack. “Thousands
of sheep, just grazing the New World
forest into treeless Scottish heathlands.” Hack.
“Whalers dragging their kills to shore from longboats – whoa, baby!”
She jumps back, swinging the machete
in front of her feet. I peer through my camera lens, snapping photos. Movement? Something big and soundless, deep
in the brush, like a disembodied shadow. It’s gone before I flex my trigger
finger. I blink away cold stinging sweat and look above my camera into the barbed-wire
mesh of scrub oak.
“You saw that?” I say.
“Dude, how could I miss it?” says
Dr. Driscoll. “That was an epic rat!”
“Oh. But... Never mind.”
Driscoll gets on one knee beside
Fernandez and jots notes in her pad. I point out some coppery feathers on the
other side of the clearing. She tells me to be quiet while she’s writing. I ask
about the marks on the deer’s back. She says silence is gold. Fair enough.
They don’t know I dropped out of Harvard
Medical School my fourth year. I’ve also been on safari in Tanzania. I understand
trauma and slaughter. The slash marks in the deer’s neck and shoulders are deep
and precise. Its back is torn up. Something mounted it and ripped its head off,
like a giant hyena or a wolf or even an exotic hybrid, but with the strength of
a bear. The missing limb and heart and the disembowelment are confusing,
however. Those look surgical. Meanwhile, the skull looks bashed, cracked open; yup,
there are blood stains on the boulder. And the marks on the animal’s back
resemble puncture wounds. Click.
A sunray shoots through the sharp
woody tangle. Lights up something beside the feathers. It glows like a golden
strand of spider web. I point it out, but Fernandez tells me to zip it. I
salute him.
A cloud passes over the sun. The
golden thread dims. I pluck it from beside the feathers before it disappears.
It lights up again in my hand. The thing’s weird resilience and luster is
captivating. Probably a hair, but more like a small-gauge acupuncture needle. As
I pocket it, something glows blue and then extinguishes in the brush ahead of
me. Maybe the sun hit on colored glass or a butterfly or a blue bird.
Twigs snap in the distance. Then
more. We share a silent what-the-hell?
moment. The rustling and snapping gets louder. Closer. We discern growling. Something
is crashing along the path that Dr. Driscoll just carved with her machete. I
suck in breath and swivel my head. Fernandez is up, his hand on his Glock. No
predators on Nantucket, right, Sergeant? Even Dr. Driscoll’s dusky face goes
pale.
“Hello?” Fernandez keeps calling
out. Dr. Driscoll and I join him. The crashing gets nearer. The snorting and
growling is wet and urgent.
“Three people here,” says Fernandez.
The snarls sound hungry. “Put your guns up, three people here.” His voice is
high and strangled.
He unbuckles the holster on his
Glock.
A Rottweiler and a blue hound burst
through the opening on long vinyl leashes. Two shotgun-toting, orange-clad
hunters follow them. Fernandez sighs, visibly relieved. I’m not.
“Oh hell yeah, now that’s a kill!”
says Dennis Pike, struggling to hold back his big Rottweiler from Driscoll and
the deer.
“Looks like a fuckin’ zombie piñata!”
says his brother, Ramone Pike, pulling his own hound’s leash against his chest.
The Pike brothers. Local fishermen
with scars and missing teeth above fishnet beards and burly shoulders. Ramone
locks eyes with me. He doesn’t smile.
“Beautiful morning,” I say. He spits
brown ooze into the sand.
We both remember the time they
pulled fishing knives on me at a beach party. I was fifteen. The Pikes, a
couple years older, informed me it was for locals only. I idiotically protested
that I was a life-long summer kid. That a popular local girl had invited me. I
didn’t know she’d dated Ramone in middle school. I remember my face feeling
like it collapsed. Falling onto the sand. Looking up at them through a swollen
eye in a kind of awe at the way the shadows of the campfire distorted their
blockish teenage features into those of middle-aged convicts.
Sgt. Fernandez buckles in his gun
and exclaims that they scared the bejeezus out of him. More rustling and heavy
breathing on the path. We look up. Thick hands slap at the shrub opening.
The fat man steps through and smiles
and nods hello at me. Swears at the greedy talons of scrub oak clawing at his
shoulder. I can only gape. He whistles at the deer and sidles his sweaty bulk beside
Dr. Driscoll and Sgt. Fernandez, asking chummily what they think did this to
the deer. His heavy working class speech and twinkle-eyed charm are disarming. Driscoll
speculates on predators, scavengers, disease, and demented pranksters.
“Gorman--what the hell?” I say.
Norm Gorman’s belly heaves beneath
his tattered cheap leather jacket and ill-fitting orange hunting vest. The
unlit cigar between his thick Irish-Saxon lips wags like a wet, vulgar tongue. He
wipes his brow with the back of his hand, holding a reporter’s notebook with
the New England Daily Tribune logo.
“Oh, you know me; can’t stay away
from Nantucket’s rugged beauty, historic charm, the thrill of the hunt, and all
that other hackneyed crap you keep regurgitatin’,” says Gorman, sucking the air
like a milkshake. “And when my new buddies here heard what good pals me and you
was, they took the day off the boats to go huntin’.”
“You know Nantucket’s my beat,” I
say. “This is my story.”
Gorman flashes his big,
coffee-toothed grin and takes notes above Dr. Driscoll. My heart pounds. Harder
and harder, then arhythmically.
The scrub oak closes in on me. I’m
being sucked out of my skin from the top of my head. My vision darkens. My throat
swells. My heart throbs. Panic rises, a dark, fathomless tide. The adrenaline
sprays through my veins like a punctured artery. I’ll freeze if I don’t start
moving.
“Poaching my story won’t solve your problems,”
I say, frustrated with the weakness in my voice. “It’s not my fault you cozied
up with dirty cops. I’m telling Maggie you’re here. She’ll get my back.”
Dennis lets his dog loose at me. Yanks
the leash against his chest. The Rottweiler growls, inches from my face.
“Try that shit again and I’ll have
your dog,” says Fernandez. Dennis curls the corner of his lip beneath his
grizzly bear beard and says his hand slipped.
The samples have been collected.
“I’ll get these to Doc Mulcahey,”
says Dr. Driscoll. “Guys, don’t molest the carcass in the meantime. Got it?”
Ramone Pike belches. Dennis Pike spits
on the ground and mutters. Sgt. Fernandez shakes his head, says, “Your mother
must be so proud,” and helps Dr. Driscoll into her backpack.
Dennis turns his shoulder into mine
as he walks past me to the opening. I meet his glare; shrink away. His eyes--they’re
not just blood-shot, they’re murky red, darting about like ping-pong balls.
Wild. Crazed. His sinewy middle finger waves at me like a billy club.
“Don’t misquote me, summer kid,” he
says with carrion breath. His shotgun dangles from one hand. “We gotta square
up, you and me.”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
But Dennis staggers away. Ramone follows.
“Stop using so many fucking adverbs,”
says Ramone. His clear tenor conveys unexpected intelligence. He was almost
good-looking back when he had a full set of teeth and starred as the high
school football team’s bone-crushing middle linebacker. His older brother, Dennis,
wreaked havoc on the defensive line like a shroomed-up berserker. “Write like
you got a pair. Not all flowery and passive. Read some Bukowski.” I tip my Nantucket
Whalers cap and say thanks for the tip. The brothers follow their dogs out of
the clearing.
Driscoll and Fernandez disappear
into the underbrush behind them. I try to follow, but Gorman grabs my elbow and
wraps a pork-and-whiskey-smelling arm around my shoulders. He asks me about the
mutilations. “Just curious,” he says. “Not looking to steal your byline, honest, kid!” Something about his
flat-toothed coffee grin makes you fear its disappearance.
I yank my arm away. I’m trembling.
The yellow acid floods my brain, frying my neural circuits. I tell him not to
touch me. My voice cracks. He gets in my grill and tells me to go screw. My
eyes twitch and bubble. The world flashes hot and dark. “Just leave,” I say. “Go
home.” He pokes my chest and says he’ll do whatever he wants on his own time. I’m
at the precipice. Darkness surrounds me. There’s something beyond that heavy
black membrane but... I don’t know. I’ve never punched through it. The darkness
always wins.
I open my mouth. Words die in my
chest. I’m frozen. Gorman chuckles and says, “See youz.” He ambles back to the
trail, humming Dirty Old Town.
I wait in the clearing for the panic
to ebb, for my senses to return. A monarch butterfly flutters onto the deer’s
ear. Click. The two yellowjackets buzz
like tiny chainsaws over the brains, smashing and stabbing each other with
their stingers. One tumbles to the sand, dead. Click. The other buzzes in a sickly circle over the snout, then drops
lifeless to the earth. Click.
My phone trembles against my thigh.
I look at the text message. From Judy. SUCCESS!
reads the subject. My breath returns. She just locked in a time this summer for
our wedding at the yacht club and a reception at the golf club. I don’t want to
know what her father is paying. But I smile. I can’t wait to see her tonight. I
picture clingy material hanging from her pale, soft skin--
A sharp gust kicks sand into my
face. I look back at the deer as I shield my eyes. Something glints in the
gathering pool of sunlight behind its head. Squinting, I walk to it. Metal,
half-revealed. I prize it from the sandy earth. My lips part. I lick them. My
chest catches fire. A coin. A very valuable coin. From Oenea, capital of Ikaria,
an ancient Greek island. It’s perhaps twenty-three hundred years old. Artemis,
Goddess of hunting (among other things) and patron deity of the island of
Ikaria, is on one side. A bull is on the other.
“What the hell?” I murmur.
A noise--not quite animal, not quite
twigs snapping--rumbles behind the deer carcass. Blue sparks in the shadows.
Tiny bolts of electricity zap through my chest. Not panic. I’m excited. Like a
teenager glimpsing a flash of silk panties.
The Last Ancient
By Eliot Baker
Pulitzer-nominated reporter, Simon Stephenson knows he must write the
story. Billions of lives and dollars are at stake. Maybe he should even kill
the mythological creature hunting on Nantucket. That’s what a mysterious French
chemist and Simon’s best friend, a charming Greek hit man, tell him.
Trouble is, he's falling in love with it. And She doesn't want him to
write the story. She wants something else. Something only he can give.
He needs to put it all together. The ancient coins are the key. Someone
or something is leaving them at deer mutilations and murder scenes around the
island. Looking in places he’d never imagined possible, Simon confronts a
diabolical conspiracy woven into his family’s darkest secrets.
Meanwhile, his tennis-champion fiancée is going Defcon One bridezilla,
and a gorgeous TV reporter has her own intentions. Battling panic attacks and
pursued by a host of nasty characters – some natural, others less so – Simon
faces a world where no one is what they seem. Especially not himself.
