The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Read online

  When the River Ran Dry

  THE SPECIMEN CHRONICLES

  Specimen 959

  Echoes of Esharam

  Editors: Chet Benson & Rebecca Rue

  the seventh life of aline lloyd

  Copyright © 2019 Robert Davies

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by BHC Press

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018949513

  ISBN: 978-1-948540-91-9 (Hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-947727-93-9 (Softcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-947727-94-6 (Ebook)

  Visit the publisher:

  www.bhcpress.com

  Dedicated to the memory of

  — Glen R. Fitzpatrick —

  fair winds and following seas, my friend

  “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are,

  and the Old Ones shall be.

  Not in the spaces we know,

  but between them.

  They walk serene and primal,

  undimensioned and to us unseen.”

  ~ H.P. Lovecraft ~

  SECRETS. My philosophy professor lectured about the nature of secrets and I can hear him still. Without a need to qualify his statement our ancient, slightly eccentric Austrian teacher insisted secrets were made by a mysterious behavioral instrument to shield weak and flawed humanity from the truth—to hide away from others those things we think or do but cannot justify. Sometimes, he said, the worst secrets become easier to conceal when there’s too much to lose if the light is allowed to invade the darkness. I ignored his words as indecipherable, pre-Socratic nonsense threatening my final grade, but today they’ve become something more.

  I always hated secrets, even as a kid. Secrets were simply lies of omission by another name when I was young and hadn’t kept enough of them to understand the distinction. I hated surprises, too. It was irrational, perhaps, but secrets and surprises somehow made me feel inadequate and the victim of a swindle. Today, I live with a secret like no other and I’ll keep this one the rest of my life because it’s in my interest; all things considered, it seems a small price to pay. Reviewers in a distant future might read and find this narrative an amazing discovery—earth-shattering, perhaps—but in the beginning, most of it just seemed like plain, shitty luck to me.

  At the end of it all, we waited for a decision from shadowy figures that hide within soundproof government agencies I once believed exist only in the minds of Hollywood screenwriters. They will make demands and we will either meet them or the conflict will escalate. I’m hopeful because I know they’re unwilling to provoke a power and fury they were once determined to harness, if only for a need to keep unexplained and impossible events from public view. We, on the other hand, just want to be left alone.

  When I met with them on an otherwise deserted airport ramp, Burke and Halliwell stood away at what probably seemed a reasonable distance, even if it wasn’t. Their Minister wanted to think about it, they said, so we agreed and a sort of truce was struck with the memory of those horrific scenes still fresh in Burke’s mind.

  We didn’t know it then but the faceless Minister had already agreed to a proposal drafted by Burke as a condition for a peaceful end. I was surprised when he finally told us but the plan was inspired, and I have to give him credit for that. And anyway, a bargain would mean the terrible effects of another confrontation could be avoided and the tragic events would drift from memory. Ordinary people beyond the fence will never know and that truth makes Burke feel better.

  In exchange, they wanted a series of in-depth discussions plus blood and tissue samples for study so that science and technology might yet be brought to bear in a hunt to explain those things nothing else can. It’s unlikely they needed “interviews” for anything beyond the purpose of demonstrating thorough adherence to procedure, in case anyone above them ever asks, but they demanded a chronology, too—a narrative—as accompanying documentation to those sessions.

  Burke insisted the talks would be informal but men like him don’t do anything that isn’t formal. He wouldn’t admit it openly but they’re convinced the transcripts will never be seen outside their insular society. Perhaps they could broker some of the research findings to other agencies in Israel or Germany through the normal process of intelligence horse-trading, but I think they’ll keep most of it for themselves. The deal was reasonable so we went along with it and a chronological text was the product of our bargain.

  Debriefings would take barely a week, Halliwell said. I watched her as he spoke and it was easy to see the tedious negotiation was becoming intolerable. They were polite and overtly apologetic about the delay but only because they didn’t want another look behind a curtain where cautious, rational people never go. Waiting in that curtain’s shadow is a promise—a direct threat—the officials would rather not face again, and who could blame them? Despite a cool façade they’re still afraid of her, and they should be, but it serves to remind them what will happen if they renege on our agreement. After it ends, solitude will be its own reward and the researchers will have plenty to study, so the purposeful, delicate truce is maintained; the mutual goals—ours and theirs—are still in harmony. In another month, Burke’s laboratory people will have something interesting to hold them over until the next time (and more interviews) with other unique, gifted people who don’t yet know what’s coming at them.

  It couldn’t be said for all the moments on the road of this strange adventure but most of it I remember in fairly elaborate detail. Do I remember by my natural memory alone, you could reasonably wonder, or is it something more? I like to think it’s the former but I couldn’t swear to it at this point. The officials might ask if she influences my recall merely to enhance it, but they would rather know if she shapes and guides my thoughts to her own design with or without my approval. Either way, they expected a written record as one of the conditions for our freedom—for being left alone—so I filled the pages of an ordinary Word document with our absurd and unlikely story.

  “Don’t limit your account,” they said. “Describe what happened—the events as they occurred—but tell us more than mere facts, Mr. Morgan; be creative and think of yourself as a storyteller!”

  A storyteller, perhaps, but my task was typing out the procession of an impossible tale that may never be fully explained. The important people with secret titles the public never sees wanted me to “be comfortable with the process,” Burke insisted, as though I was recounting the story aloud to an audience. They stared at us from across the table and said with straight faces, “You mustn’t name us, of course—keep our involvement removed as you would actors in a stage production, but always remember to describe how it felt.”

  Yes—tell the story for their archives and future study but be sure to avoid connecting them to it. After all, we can’t have this sort of thing getting out, can we? I could hear them muttering in the corner and worried something bad may yet happen before we’re safely gone. I want them to read that damned narrative with expectations of a sanitary, linear account, only to see and understand in the end how lives can be turned upside down or even ended because of them and what they represent.

  Halliwell and Burke won’t mind seeing their names in my notes because they will simply delete the references they don’t li
ke and leave the ones that carry no risk of identification. They’ll pick through word by word in one of their hidden, windowless enclaves where “insider” status and retinal scanning are required for access. Bland people with forgettable faces will match my words against the evidence they’ve collected if only to reassure themselves nothing sneaky and frightening waits for them in the dark. I gave them their narration and now we will leave others to prepare for an uncertain future; they will go down those paths without us because bargains and agreements cut both ways.

  While we wait out the last details (and the reliable plod of all government bureaucracies) I have decided to edit my original notes and expand them into this private account. Hurd and his Minister would be furious if they found out but Burke is smarter than that and I’m sure he considered such a thing long ago; he knows any revelations I might make will be kept under wraps and made mostly for Vienne’s benefit. When this last bit is finished I’ll save the document to three or four external hard drives and squirrel them away where no one would think to look. If we are ever compelled to explain, this chronology will be my first stop.

  Berezan, the anemic runt from Livermore Labs (officially, I should add because I am not certain he ever set foot in the place) asked me during our first interview for a point of origin to the experience. Halliwell wondered, too, and since I don’t dislike him as much as Berezan I answered truthfully: it was a phone call from a London attorney to my sister, Vienne. I didn’t get the relayed message until later but that’s really where all this started and it’s as good a place as any to begin.

  ON that rainy October morning, I was en route to an investigation in southeast Tennessee where firefighters and rescue teams stepped carefully over twisted aluminum panels and what little else remained of a private airplane. As they usually do, the shreds and tatters of affluence scattered up a wooded hillside gave stark testimony to the suddenness and finality of most plane crashes. Hours later, details would emerge and the backstory local newsrooms were more than eager to run filtered out through televisions as families sat down to dinner.

  A dental technologies vice president from Memphis was flying himself down to Chattanooga for a conference about expensive, 3D waterjet machines that create prosthetic teeth. When weather conditions and visibility he believed would improve had not, his single-engine Mooney went into the side of a mountain at 180 mph not far from Wauhatchie. On an instrument flight plan, the controllers in Atlanta would have guided him safely for a handoff to Chattanooga Approach and vectors for an eventless landing. Instead, he committed the sin of ignoring weather updates and zero visibility, a grave error committed by those pilots without instrument training who don’t always come home alive. He made no calls to air traffic controllers—no urgent request for positional help. Judging by the impact point and angle of attack as his plane tore through the trees, Mr. Memphis was flying straight and level with no idea he was about to die.

  Field reporters, suitably grim in North Face jackets with embroidered network logos, looked at the charred debris field and saw the arrogance of success. They wouldn’t say it directly but all of them recognized the signs: a well-heeled, corporate climber with more money than brains who ignored rules when they became inconvenient. The pilot was a prominent industry figure, equal parts “mover and shaker” they used to say. Fourteen hours earlier he became another who paid the price for pushing his luck in fog-bound, instrument conditions he wasn’t trained to handle. In the hovering mist the reporters aimed their harsh camera lights at another statistic: a horrible mistake by an up-and-coming executive unaccustomed to making them. This one would be his last.

  The preliminaries pointed to simple pilot error and interviews with the dead man’s associates only confirmed what was already believed: he had gone beyond himself and his flying skills because no one was there to tell him he couldn’t. In the previous year, I had worked the investigation of an identical machine that suffered fuel starvation, compelling its pilot to set down inconveniently early along the furrowed rows of a cornfield outside Indianapolis.

  As my plane taxied to a stop, the ramp director signaled between two hangars for our van and I pulled my phone from a pocket to find a missed call. In the drizzle on a shimmering tarmac at Chattanooga Metro Airport, I listened in silence as Vienne’s voice message told me Damon was gone.

  When I called her, Vienne’s voice was weak and distant. I struggled with sadness but also shock because his life had not been led in dangerous pursuits or filled with high-risk adventures that invite disaster and bring little surprise for survivors when the worst finally happens. Damon didn’t climb mountains or scuba dive with sharks; he didn’t know a wingsuit from a garden rake and zip lining that grandmothers routinely enjoy was at the top of his “never going to happen” list. I won’t pretend we were ever close, not the way brothers usually are, but Vienne’s disappointment made clear my muted reaction was something less than it should be. In truth, I found myself dwelling on the pathology of his death more than the meaning of it. Arrhythmia—sudden and unexpected—took him as he slept in the sweltering heat of a cheap Nairobi hotel room. He was fit and careful to maintain a proper diet but even that couldn’t shield him from what waited inside a genetically flawed heart.

  Our brother made his living as an archaeologist, dividing time between lectures for master’s candidates and filthy dig sites that always seem to pop up in places where decent living conditions are rare and the fly population is heaviest. He had a remarkable knack for spotting and appraising exceptional pieces, which also kept him in the favor of wealthy collectors, and we later learned a prospective client’s interest in Meru tribal art was his purpose for being in Kenya at all.

  Archaeology was his passion and reason for living but brokers (and the money they represent) went far beyond compensation for his part-time job at the university in Reading a few miles west of London. I’ve never been to equatorial Africa but I know Damon wasn’t overly fond of the place. I could see Vienne in my thoughts smiling sadly at the irony, insisting Damon would resent dying so far from the fragments of Phoenician pottery and erotic Hindu sculptures cluttering his strange, angular apartment in Spain.

  They bought a nook for his ashes at the cemetery in a little town near Malaga because, Vienne said, it was the only place where Damon felt he belonged. She always waited at the halfway point between us, as middle siblings are often obliged to do, but I suspect her tolerance for his eccentricities was tested more often than she would admit. He had a girlfriend I never knew about, too—a primary school teacher he met in Alicante named Isolda Marquez. We met her at the funeral but she didn’t say much. Vienne learned an estrangement between them wasn’t reconciled before he died so we watched her for a while, knowing how the helplessness of regret could only have made things that much worse.

  I remember when he moved there to do research for his doctoral dissertation, and in the photos he took near Gibraltar he was wearing khaki expedition shorts, a Syracuse University T-shirt, and utilitarian sandals with soles made of old tires. Damon was in his element, smiling into an Iberian afternoon behind mirrored sunglasses he was convinced made him appear hip and cosmopolitan. He told Vienne about northern Europeans who flocked there to bask on the Mediterranean shore in winter, pasty white and desperate to escape gray skies when the first storms of winter rolled in from the North Atlantic. She laughed when he complained about swarms of tour groups at the airport pouring out of chartered LTU widebodies from Germany in weekly waves to invade the beaches. They lounged and smiled for photos, tanning with overpriced drinks and the false hospitality of locals who despise them. Beyond the horizon, their envious and shivering neighbors in places like Düsseldorf, Helsinki, or Aalborg huddled against the cutting wind.

  Damon believed the “holiday army” couldn’t truly appreciate the ground beneath their feet and most, he insisted, walked upon it in ignorance. For him, it was a hallowed place where the ancient Arab world collided with the west in a distant past as Europe clawed its way out
from the Dark Ages. Two realities blending on those bright shores, he said, long before the industrial power of one subsumed nomadic traditions of the other. Alhazen walked there, and before him, Roman legions and Berber kings in the shadow of the great rock. Damon loved all of it.

  Weeks went by until at last a London attorney retained by the university was given the job of organizing those aspects of Damon’s estate that applied to the institution. As executor, Vienne went to see after his will and complete the administrative tasks that so often make the mourning process a worse nightmare than it should be. At first, it seemed a simple process and she authorized the release of purpose-built containers with Damon’s most valuable artifacts to be sorted, cataloged, and stored in one of the dimly lit basement rooms most college archaeology departments seem to maintain. Some artifacts were more prized than others, loaned or vended off to museums, and the curators at one of those museums—in Sendai, of all places—even ran a lovely show conducted in part as a memorial to Damon’s globe-spanning career and his contributions to the discipline.

  It seemed odd when we discovered the notoriety he enjoyed and how much his fellow archaeologists admired and appreciated his talents. I knew he had no trouble paying his bills, but a pile of trade publications ran stories about Damon’s intuitive success and he became a celebrity in a world filled with the names of people few of us have ever heard. Vienne wondered if my surprise was a product of the temperamental distance between us or simply the different people we became. I knew of Damon’s travels and various appraisal jobs for Australian or Saudi billionaires mostly from Vienne, but her perspective on our brother was always better than my own.