The Last Ancient

By Eliot Baker

Pulitzer-nominated reporter, Simon Stephenson knows he must kill the mythological creature hunting on Nantucket. A mysterious French alchemist and a loveable Greek hit man tell him so. Billions of dollars and lives are at stake – not to mention the story of the century. Trouble is, he's fallen in love with it. And she doesn't want him to write the story. She wants something else. Something only he can give.

Following a bloody trail of ancient coins, Simon confronts a diabolical conspiracy and his own family’s dark secrets. Meanwhile, his tennis-champion fiancée has become bridezilla, and a gorgeous TV reporter has her own intentions. Battling panic attacks and pursued by a host of nasty characters, from deadly alchemists and virulent beasts, to a sleazy rival reporter and a corrupt sheriff, Simon faces a world where no one is what they seem. Not even himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Champagne Book Group
• Release date: Jan 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771550437

Book preview

BURST Presents

The Last Ancient

By

Eliot Baker

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

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

BURST

www.burstbooks.ca

A Division of Champagne Books

Copyright 2013 by Eliot Baker

ISBN 978-1-77155-043-7

December 2013

Cover Art by Trisha FitzGerald

Produced in Canada

Champagne Book Group

#2 19-3 Avenue SE

High River, AB T1V 1G3

Canada

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Champagnebooks.com (or a retailer of your choice) and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

To Sharon Baker for inspiring; to Gordon Baker for believing.

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.

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 yellow jackets buzz over the red pulp. Land. Feed. Hover above their feast. 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 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 Sergeant 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 hat as she unpacks measuring tape, sample tubes, and baggies from her turquoise external frame pack. Sergeant Fernandez 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 Sergeant 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, 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 wind. It is 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 as I continue to take pictures.

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.

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 Driscoll.

The deer’s remaining foreleg suddenly stiffens as though saluting, hitting Driscoll’s thigh.

Oh, fuck me hard on Sunday, says Driscoll, jumping into Fernandez’s arms.

Fernandez 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. 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? Driscoll squints, hacks at something, and shrugs, continuing, punctuating each sentence the sound of the tool cracking into bone, Wampanoag Indians shucking shellfish around campfires. Quakers praying at the meeting house. Thousands of sheep, just grazing the New World forest into treeless Scottish heathlands. 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 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.

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 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 Driscoll’s dusky face goes pale.

Hello? Fernandez keeps calling out. 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.

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 Driscoll and 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 arrhythmically.

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 Driscoll. Guys, don’t molest the carcass in the meantime. Got it?

Ramone belches. Dennis spits on the ground and mutters. Fernandez shakes his head, says, Your mother must be so proud, and helps 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. The two yellow jackets buzz like tiny chainsaws over the brains, smashing and stabbing each other with their stingers. One tumbles to the sand, dead. The other buzzes in a sickly circle over the snout, then drops lifeless to the earth.

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 Oenoa, 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.

Two

Cecilia Rodriguez is trying to look more outdoorsy than gorgeous as she holds the microphone to my face at the deer weigh-in station. She’s not succeeding.

The neon lime and pink of Cecilia’s Helly Hansen jacket accentuates the bronze glow of her cheeks and her red Twizzler lips. Blood-spackled deer are hauled by hunters wrapped in orange blaze to the crude wooden pallet scale behind me. Slim pines partially obscure the algae-stained beach a stone’s throw behind Cecilia. Her lips stop moving. It’s my turn to speak.

My shots from this morning are running as B-roll on the monitors manned by her two-man crew in the news truck behind her. My straightforward answers are frustrating her.

Yes, Nantucket has the highest incidence of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases in the country. Yes, the deer population is amongst the country’s densest. Yes, most experts see a connection. Yes, people are alarmed. Yes, the extended hunting season is controversial. Yes, I just witnessed the sixth confirmed mutilated deer carcass. Yes, it was disturbing. No, I don’t know what killed it.

A hunter lugs a scraggly little doe with a clean headshot by her bound legs onto the scale behind me. Cecilia asks, Many associate the term ‘animal mutilations’ with crop circles and satanic rituals. Simon, do these mutilations remind you of anything you have ever seen to that effect? Her tongue wraps around words like mutilations as though they were delicious.

The experts are looking at all the possible culprits, but I haven’t heard aliens or Satan anywhere on their list of suspects, I say. I can’t tell if she just flicked a smile or a snarl at me.

There are suspects, then?

I’ve been told no. The fact is anything from pranksters, to scavengers, to insects, to parasites or diseases, to something else entirely could be at work.

Could an exotic pet be on the loose? she presses.

That’s a popular item around the water cooler, but officials say it’s unlikely.

And what do you think, in your experience as an environmental reporter?

Frankly, Cecilia, I’ve never encountered anything quite like this before.

Well, I’m sure everyone on Nantucket and beyond will be relieved when the killer—whoever, or whatever, it may be—is found. This is Cecilia Rodriguez, reporting from Nantucket.

She winks at me—we both sort of won that back-and-forth. If the story gets hot, she gets more time on Nantucket, which is a bonus. Best damn island in the world. National Geographic said so in 2012, and those in the know have been saying it for centuries. Playground of influence. At the forefront of land conservation and historic preservation. World-class cuisine. And the beaches and fishing are unrivaled. Shit, I should write for the Chamber of Commerce.

She hands the microphone to her pudgy cameraman and checks her watch, a diamond-crusted gold Omega. She mutters, Son of a whore.

I ask her if she’s late for a ferry. No, she’s staying through tomorrow evening. But the Pats’ game will start in twenty minutes and she doesn’t know where to watch it. I don’t pay attention to gossip mags, but everyone in New England knows she’s dating the Patriots’ star tight end, Tim Harris.

A ruckus kicks up at the edge of the parking lot. Spinning tires over loose rock and sand. Sludge rock blasting loud enough that Cecilia and I and the other five hunters, local builders and a fireman I recognize named Jonah, scan the entry gate. A truck full of hunters in orange blaze are followed by a van that screeches past the gate so fast Fernandez stands and holds his hand out at the white work vehicle, motioning it to slow down. The truck carries a bumper sticker with provocatively shaped antlers that reads, Nice Rack!

Thanks for the tip, Cecilia says without looking at me. She tries to hurry into her news van before any of the visibly drunk hunters hopping out of the truck can say something stupid to her.

She’s too slow. Cecilia looks more amused than disgusted when the four hunters in the dented white Ford belch and holler at her to report on how big their guns are. Two does and a buck are stacked like broken and bloody cord wood in the truck bed, their tongues lolling out of their mouths. Their heads jostle over a blue tarp when the rear hatch lowers with a jolt. Parks and Recreation officer Jim Parks drags an old Marine Corps Kabar knife across the deer’s teeth, inspecting their age and health. He was picking his own teeth and nails with the same knife a moment earlier.

Emerging from the white work van’s driver seat, the silverback of the hunting group has a keg for a belly and the only clean -shaven face of the lot. He opens the van’s rear door. Nine deer are twisted around each other like bleeding tree roots. Flies whirl above a doe’s head like a double helix. Another fly crawls lazily along the snout of a buck. Blood pools in channels along the van’s corrugated floor.

While the younger hunters haul the deer onto the scale piece by piece, he’s staring down his belly and explaining to Officer Parks how they’d made each kill with their shotguns and his single-loader rifle. Parks, himself a hunter, nods and scribbles into his clipboard.

The fat hunter lights up a smoke despite the wildlife official’s objections. He looks at me with a burning glint in his eye. His eyes— They are road-mapped and quivering.

Hey! You. Reporter. See that eight-point buck? I hit it from a hundred fifty yards with this single-load rifle. Write that up. Kirk Poszluski, that’s my name. We’re the Brockton Bunch. Give us a month and we’ll clean up your little deer problem in no time.

Happy hunting to you guys, I say, and I’m not entirely sarcastic. The island deer population needs culling.

Two of the other hunters are young enough to be Kirk’s sons. The others look in-between generations, and several of them are wearing the same Kirk’s Insulation T-shirts beneath their orange blaze jackets. Most of them have thick rings on their left hands. Kirk’s is a sun engraved with four symbols: a bull, a lion, an eagle, and wavy maze-like lines. The younger hunters are laughing and joking in snorts and spits like kids in the school parking lot gathering behind the seventh grader who shaves.

Let the liberal mainstream media get it right for once. We just killed a dozen menaces to society. Kirk’s speech drips with that condescending, folksy disdain typical of right-wing radio hosts. He stares down the surrounding hunters with their more meager hauls. They shake their heads and exchange words with the lower ranks of the Brockton Bunch.

The tall fireman, Jonah, spits and grumbles, Don’t let the door hit ya on the way outta town, Ya-hoos.

I’m not disagreeing with you, I say. And that’s an impressive shot, considering your rifle is rated only up to ninety yards.

I wish Cecilia would go to her van, because she’s encouraging the fat hunter’s booze-fueled rant by standing near me.

I could shoot the pen out of your hand from a hundred fifty yards with this rifle, he says and takes a long, deliberate drag off his cigarette while his gang yips out affirmations.

That might be a community service, too, I say. Kirk doesn’t get it. Jim Parks does, and laughs in a way that tells Kirk he’s not being mocked.

A short, squat, red-eyed hunter in his late twenties with a scraggly red beard and greasy matching hair beneath his orange camouflage hat sneers: No rack’s too big for the Brockton Bunch! Not even hers. Print that! His pals join in with chants of, Print that! Kirk curls a wormy lip at his younger hunters.

Mumbling print that, I scribble in my tablet and thank the Brockton Bunch for their comments. Kirk, their leader, glowers at me but nods sagely at Cecilia and says, We’re performing a community service, young lady, once more before herding the other four back into the truck, while a blonde kid with dark stubble, the youngest, goes with Kirk to his van.

She watches the hunters leave and says, Holy cow, where’s the dueling banjos? Are all the hunters like that?

The wind blows Cecilia’s hair into her eyes. She looks at me. Her eyes are big and kind when she’s not reporting.

Nah, they’re usually good guys. Especially the locals. I hunt sometimes.

Her expression changes. Simon Stephenson, she says, tasting my name. Her eyes widen. Yo, hold up. Did you write that story about the arms dealers a couple years back?

You read that?

Everyone did, yo. And you did that series on the military dudes getting cancer working on radio towers, right? And the sick airline workers?

Me again and me again. How did—

"I’m on TV but I can read, smart kid. Cecilia puts her hand on a jutting hip and tilts her chin. I went to Columbia Journalism School. But for real, you got skills. I actually like your hard science stuff better than your investigative, though."

Right on. Thanks. Me, too, I say.

Except when your features get all pudgy with adverbs and puffy adjectives.

Ha! You’re prettier than my first critic today.

"Dude, your Science of Love piece for Valentine’s last year messed with my head. It changed the way I look at love. It’s more like a drug or a drive—like freakin’ cocaine or hunger—than like an emotion, right? What did you say? ‘Under an MRI, love birds and coke heads are nearly identical, both in soaring ecstasy and in searing withdrawal.’"

Uh, yeah. I think that’s what I wrote. I can’t believe you remember that.

This is like a steel trap, she says, pointing at her temple. But for real. You got passion. It jumps off the page. Makes me miss print reporting.

She reaches for the door handle of her van. Opens it. Her jacket lifts above the waist of her windproof pants, skin-tight and stretching around her heart-shaped behind. She climbs into her news van with her cameraman and sound engineer. Cecilia tells me to call her first if another deer carcass shows up.

I tell her that’s what I’m here for.

She pauses. Call me if you go out tonight, she says. Max and Donny only hang out in chat rooms. Max, the chubby twenty-something cameraman wearing a Weird War comics T-Shirt and Decepticon hoodie, waves. Donny, a skinny balding guy in his thirties wrapped in faded Eastern Mountain Sports gear, raises a thumb.

I’ve got plans with my fiancée tonight, I say.

Cecilia smiles. Slams the blue van’s door. Her cameraman, Max, gives me a peace sign before gunning the engine and winding through the parking lot, where three new trucks are arriving.

The weigh-in station’s American flag snaps flat in a sand-scouring gust. The tall flagpole rattles and clinks like a ship’s mast. I look forward to settling into my Jeep’s interior. A slight hunter in green and orange blaze with a floppy-eared orange hat is standing in front of the hood. I step around him toward my driver’s side door. The grinning hunter has smooth skin and stands with the coiled stillness of a teenage athlete. We make eye contact. I smile to be friendly; do a double-take.

It’s a woman. Well into her thirties. She’s slender, without curves or hips. Her delicately chiseled jaw and cheekbones are so boyish she’s handsome. But her teeth are straight and white, her lips are plump and red. She doesn’t move from my car, and stares at me with a knowing twinkle as though we’re familiar.

Uh, hi. Have we met? I ask, standing in the weigh-in station’s shadow. The sudden wind blows so hard I have to speak over it and hold my hat. I’m parked beside the chain-link fence, far away from the other cars at the opposite end of the house-like office building.

It is unlikely, she answers with a husky French accent. She moves her shotgun from one shoulder to the other. Her eyes, twinkling and serene, recall yoga masters and mountain climbers.

Can I help you? I say.

I believe so, she says. "Tell me—what did you really see this morning? Vraiment, in truth?"

What?

You are the reporter, no? The one chasing all those poor, dead animals.

Oh, right. Well, like I said on TV—

I saw you this morning, she says, lowering her voice and turning to stand directly in front of me. The American flag flaps behind her. And your experts. And those other hunters, with their fat friend. With my binoculars, I saw you all walk into the brush and come out with much excitement.

It feels as though she’s growing taller, stepping closer. Her eyes—her creepy, intense eyes—seem to enlarge, to brighten.

Like I just said on camera, we found another carved-up deer, I say.

The Ikarian coin gets heavy in my pocket. She smiles larger. But I wonder, between you and me, a simple hunter—did you see anything else? No? Nothing? For the deer I am asking, of course. So unlike other damned creatures. Not like rats or bats or snakes. Adorable they are, no?

I pull out my notebook and ask for her name and occupation, if she’d like to comment on her hunting experience. She speaks kind of like Yoda. Nice little splash of color for tomorrow’s story.

Ah, the hunting! Well, the island was so beautiful today that I did not feel like killing anything. Anything on the island, that is. Ha! Joking, of course. You may print that if you wish. But do not print that I was disappointed. She moves the gun from one hand to the other and stares up at me with the afternoon sun shimmering directly into her eyes, which she does not squint. No, do not print that I could not find what I was seeking. Nor that I do not know what I am seeking. Strange, no? And do not print that I think you know better than I, what I am seeking.

Aha—nut job. Probably an artist sniffing her own paints. But her eyes aren’t crazy. They are soothing and patient.

Well, good luck to you, I say. She doesn’t move. I grip the door handle.

And to you, Mr. Stephenson, she says. I am certain we will see again. So small an island. So hard to escape one another.

I turn over the engine and wait for the cool air blasting through the chipped plastic vents to warm before I rub my hands against the oily breeze. I open the glove compartment for a power bar. A gold piece leans against a leather folder bursting with car documents. My breath stops. Brain chemicals are released. I’ve searched for this coin for two years. Ancient Lydia’s heraldic lion roars on one side and slays a bull on the other. The Lydia Lion. The Adam of coins. The first coin known to be minted. The last coin my father gave me from his famous collection. I looked everywhere but here, in the glove box of my old beater island car.

A blue flash. Right ahead, atop the weigh-in station’s main office. Like lightning bugs in tandem.

I grip the coin until it hurts.

~ * ~

The blue lights won’t leave my mind. Not even as I stand on the porch before the gray shingles and tall French double doors of my fiancée Judy’s parents’ summer home. It overlooks the sickle of sand shooting off the island’s northern tip, Coatue. Surveying their crescent moon putting-course of clipped grass, I consider taking her father, Hal Dresner, up on eighteen holes tomorrow at Nantucket Golf Club, whose half-million dollar membership fee he calls criminal. The three guest cottages surrounding Hal’s putting green are each several times the size of my own one-bedroom apartment back in Jamaica Plain, near Boston.

Simon! It’s been too long, says Hal. His garish plaid pants and neon collared shirt and sweater-tied-around-the-shoulders ensemble is something belched up by the gods of the links. He wears it with a half-wink at its WASPy irony. He pumps my hand with surprising vigor with one hand while holding my elbow with the other.

Great to see you, Mr. Dresner.

"Oy vey, Simon. You know better: It’s Hal! And when’ll you start calling me Dad? He winks and whispers from the side of his mouth, Don’t tell my wife, but I always wanted a son."

Hal looks cute and gnomish when he stands beside his blonde beauty queen wife, Mandy, who hugs me without actually touching me, keeping her elegant blue evening gown and frosted white gold necklace undisturbed. She ushers me inside with scathing politeness and rejoins her guests in the same gesture before I can

Reviews for The Last Ancient

[rubyandthetwins · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Simon Stephenson is a well-known reporter; long estranged from his alleged arms-dealing father because of a hard-hitting story that he wrote which had exposed Preston Stephenson's shady business dealings to the world. He lives a relatively quiet existence on Nantucket Island, working as an environmental reporter for the local newspaper, and is blissfully engaged to a beautiful young socialite.Around Nantucket Island, a series of particularly grisly animal slayings is linked to a viral epidemic which could reach Biblical proportions if it isn't contained and eliminated as soon as possible. When the various crime scenes begin to involve human victims, ritualistically murdered and peppered with ancient coins, Simon is the only man able to unlock their meaning. But Simon wonders what the coins could possibly have to do with the murders? And just what type of creature - human or inhuman - might have left them?His search for answers leads reporter Simon Stephenson on a journey through ancient mythology, numismatics, and the occult. Not to mention his own past - which turns out to be even darker than he'd realized; his murdered father was secretly studying alchemy, among other arcane subjects. Along the way, Simon battles panic attacks and a host of nasty characters - some natural, others less so. Meanwhile, Simon's heiress fiancee turns into 'bridezilla-on-a-rampage', and a gorgeous rival television reporter seduces him - concealing her true intentions.I really enjoyed this book. The plot was unusual, and I must say that some of the elements of it were slightly difficult for me to fully understand. The study of alchemy has always seemed to me to be more fantastical than based in reality. I thoroughly appreciated the humaness and humanity of the characters, despite the seemingly super-heroic acts they performed. I give The Last Ancient by Eliot Baker a definite A! and will certainly keep my eyes open for more books by this author in the future.