The Whistlers

By Mason Winfield

High school English teacher and paranormal scholar Ward Courier publishes a story collection in 1999 based on supernatural folklore and interviews with witnesses in his native upstate New York. He is shocked in 2007 when he and his book draw attention from high levels of American law enforcement. His work has foreshadowed some strange events:
– Tourist disappearances along the Tex-Mex border spark rumors of an active sacrificial cult.
– Psychologists on several continents report the recurring theme of mute, blind, sinister beggars haunting the nightmares and recovered memories of their patients. Street people of the same description start appearing in many parts of the world.
– The DEA tracks a new drug whose effects include the momentary activation of ESP. Suspected of South American origin, its North American distribution hub is Buffalo, NY.
– The FBI tracks a brutal criminal syndicate that deals in ancient Native American artifacts.
– Three Ohio pothunters dig a human jaw made of quartz crystal out of a Hopewell earthwork and are found dead after sadistic interrogations.
– Anthropologists disappear after finding a Crystal Skull in a ruined Mayan city. An American relief team comes upon a deserted estate and an Aztec-style rack holding dozens of heads, some only days old. A confiscated surveillance video holds only one impossible clue to the case.
– Archaeologists excavating a tomb near Cayabamba, Peru find altars dedicated to an insectoid vampire-god. Their guides desert, and the stranded team calls for help.
– “The Old Man of the Mountain,” a blind mystic in a cavern, dreams in a pose of prayer that has lasted since the Crusades. Sometimes he laughs in his sleep, as he surely did on September 11, 2001.
These are the threads that draw author Ward Courier into three current investigations and launch the sprawling, five-year, two-volume saga of paranormal adventure that is Mason Winfield’s “The Whistlers.”
Mason Winfield is widely acknowledged as upstate New York’s specialist in supernatural and paranormal subjects. Admirers of his research have been waiting for his first novel.
A Paranormal Intrigue and its sequel The Lord of the Dawn (Fall 2017) are unusual books. Scenes are direct and graphic, but the plot moves in feints, fades, tangents, hints and suggestions. The text is seldom dense, but the books are highly philosophical and speculative for the genre. “The Whistlers” tells its tale in episodes of several types:
– Slices-of-time with quirky American undercover agent Jason “Swingo” Jonas on his pursuit of an antiquities ring
– Reflections of narrator Ward Courier
– Courier’s reprinted literature - stories, articles and book excerpts
– Episodes in Courier’s roller-coaster affair with the dazzling, maddening Lys Mall
– Slices-of-time with the American undercover team tracking the ESP-drug, the mysterious “savvy.”
– Courier’s interviews with representatives of the FBI and DEA that serve as paranormal crash courses for the reader
– Courier’s dialogues with his mystical Seneca friend Rick Reynard, whose Native American insights open astonishing new windows into the paranormal.
Ultimately “The Whistlers” is a clash of forces whose players are only suggested. Those supporting the human and earthly order may have Masonic/Rosicrucian sources and alliances with indigenous tradition. As for the shadow looming over “The Whistlers,” the imagery suggests sacrificial gods, echelons of demonic helpers, and even inter-dimensional beings. Permeating it all are these Whistlers, the ragged vagrants we never get to know too well.
Adventure, spirituality, occultism, and outright bloody horror... By the time of “The Whistlers” dynamic payoff, we may be just ready to believe in an apocalyptic conspiracy older than civilization and even sourced in another world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mason Winfield
• Release date: Mar 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370595976

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Through their friendship and consultation with the author, these people have helped his understanding in specialized subject areas and hence have helped the text of this book.

Michael Bastine

Brooke Becker

DuWayne Bowen

Anthony Browning

Cassandra Butler

Ben Coleman

Jason Con

Sheldon Fisher

Jonathon Furman

Bill Garland

Gerald Halligan

Daniel Harms

Jon Kay

Brian Keene

Liza Rivera

Felicitas Kusch-Lango

John Laing

Rob Lockhart

Brian Meyer

Ryan Neumeister

Ted Williams

Selections from A Ghosthunter’s Journal (1999) have been reprinted courtesy of Western New York Wares, Inc., where several other books by Mason Winfield may be found. Visit www.buffalobooks.com.

The Art

Author’s note: The components of the images presented in these books – skulls, falcons, eyes-in-pyramids and the like – are symbols that are generic and usually old, with varied uses and often wildly varying interpretations. None of them are used here to put across a message of support for any of the theories or the groups that have used them. They are used ornamentally, to visually brand the plot tracks for the reader. They are used to suggest themes and possibilities we want in the reader’s mind as he or she negotiates the text. No other purpose should be read into them.

Front Cover: Digital artist/webmaster Martha Bouquin fashioned this cover based on author/artist Gerald Halligan’s profile of the Temple of Kukulkan (El Castillo) at the Mayan city of Chichen Itza, a photograph of the Mitchell-Hedges Skull of Doom, and her own photograph of the moon.

__________________



image5.png

Frontspiece/epigraph page: Inspired by lines from W. B. Yeats’ The Second Coming – evoking images of prophecy and impending cataclysm – Gerald Halligan fashioned this design implying the Egyptian solar avenger Horus in his guise of the falcon. It is Horus who sets the world right after his many clashes with the ambiguous dark god Seth. Martha Bouquin has duplicated it to evoke the trinity and shaded the replications. The white hawk represents the conscious mind forging through the portal. The dark hawk over the right wing represents the collective unconscious. The lighter hawk over the left wing represents the personal unconscious. The banner from which they swoop embodies the Egyptian dotted sun glyph, another solar symbol and also the shorthand sign by which the original Bavarian Illuminati referred to their group in their internal documents, which casts another possible theme into the action of the book.

__________________



image6.png

Hawks/dotted sun/gyres image used to close the book: The assorted triangles at the sides of the earlier image are reworked versions of familiar drawings of Yeats’ gyres. The gyres should be envisioned as imaginary, semi-physical figures like a pair of rotating ice cream cones whorling into and out of each other as if their molecules can interlock. They represent Yeat’s charts for the cycles of history, human consciousness, and personality type, among other things. We used them here to suggest the theme of the onrushing chaos fated to hit the world at predictable intervals when the gyres are separated. Then, as they always do, the gyres begin their march back to the center, and order returns.

The fully merged gyres to the reader’s far left are labelled for the phases their points represent in Yeats’ tortuous chart, Phases 1, 8, 15 and 22. The nearest gyres to them, the separated ones, are labelled Objective and Subjective to stand for the mind-sets each represents. The first merged gyre to the right of the central image is labelled according to Yeats’ vision of the components of the human psyche, the mind, personality and spirit: Will, Creative Mind, Body of Fate, and Mask. The separated gyres to the right of that are labelled Primary and Antithetical, also components of Yeats’ intricate philosophy about these symbols.

__________________



image7.jpg

The Eye of Providence/winged sun image introducing the early episodes of Team 8: Gerald Halligan drew the backdrop of this Egyptianate image based on the author’s photograph of a lintel on a Buffalo, NY, building at 204 Allen Street. The image as a whole is a takeoff on the Egyptian motif of the winged sun said to stand for divinity, royalty, and authority, and adopted for use by a number of western occult societies. The snake to each side of the disk is another royal symbol, the uraeus, the sacred cobra. In the center of the usually-blank solar disk is the Eye of Providence/All-Seeing Eye used as a symbol of God, among other interpretations, on the nation’s Great Seal seen on the back of the dollar bill. This image used in connection with American law enforcement is meant to suggest occult theories about the nation’s founding and possibilities about its true control.

__________________



image8.jpg

The double-headed falcon/winged sun/Eye of Horus banner introducing the narratives of Ward Courier: This banner was digitally reworked by Martha Bouquin based on Gerald Halligan’s image of the solar disk along with his double-headed falcon atop the Eye of Horus. Horus’ eye in the center of the disk represents vision and intellect, which seems fitting to use here since the narrator is the interpreter, the consciousness, of the book.

The double-headed raptor is a Middle Eastern emblem of royalty and grandeur like that associated with the solar disk. Anything looking in two directions at once evokes Janus, the Roman god of the margins, continuing the theme of vision associated with the narrator. This margin-god has another trait, to represent uncertain ground, which is surely the state of the narrator. Wings and birds have always been taken to suggest the human soul, and the wings here are used in different shades to represent the divisions within the narrator.

__________________



image2-1.png

The snakes/skull/pyramid banner introducing chapters: The Crystal Skull at the center is a photograph of the Mitchell-Hedges Skull that Martha Bouquin reworked digitally and set into the pale version of Gerald Halligan’s drawing of El Castillo, the shrine devoted to Kukulcan, the Mayan figure analogous to the Aztec Quetzalcoatl. On each flank is one of Halligan’s drawings of a banner often used to represent the Masonic Order of Quetzalcoatl. The image is meant to evoke themes of old wisdom biding its time before a resurfacing.

__________________



image9.png

The pyramid/skull piece used to close chapters: This dark pyramid image is Martha Bouquin’s inversion of the earlier piece based on Gerald Halligan’s drawing of El Castillo and the photograph of the Mitchell-Hedges Skull.

__________________



image10.jpg

The Sphinxes/double-headed falcon/Eye of Horus image used on the dedication page: Inspired by the Rider-Waite tarot card the Chariot, Gerald Halligan drew these Masonic sphinxes which were placed digitally around his falcon/eye image suggesting vision, wakefulness, and openness to possibilities. One traditional meaning of the sphinx as a symbol is the keeper of secrets.

__________________



image11.jpg

The skull/serpent mounds banner introducing the events in the agent Jason Jonas’ pursuit of the Crystal Skull found in Ohio and those derived from them: Gerald Halligan drew these reworked versions of the Great Serpent Mound flanking his profile of El Castillo into which Martha Bouquin embedded an image of the Mitchell-Hedges Skull.

__________________



image12.png

TheHiawatha’s Belt/shaman banner introducing the narrator’s conferences with Seneca mystic Rick Reynard: Gerald Halligan drew Hiawatha’s Belt, the iconic image representing the territory and the people of the League of Six Iroquois Nations, the Hodenosaunee – symbols of the four longhouses centered by the sacred White Pine – in one of its simpler forms. The image of the Iroquoian shaman/shapeshifter is another of his designs.

__________________



image13.jpg

The man/tentacles/wings banner introducing the published literature of Ward Courier under the pen name Mason Winfield: Martha Bouquin reworked the author’s photograph of graffiti that appears on a railroad bridge over Bowen Road in Elma, NY, and set it onto dragon wings drawn by Gerald Halligan. The central image is a stencil portrait of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft that, as of 2017, appears several times across the bridge itself and with the tentacles once on each abutment. Its use here is to keep Lovecraft and the Cthulhu-cult in the reader’s mind. We would cheerfully tribute the graffiti artist if we knew his or her name. Of course, the authorities would charge this individual if they knew his or her name. This could be quite the standoff.

__________________



image14.png

The feathered-serpent/skull/pyramid banner introducing the episodes of the agent Jason Jonas in Mexico and those derived from them: Inspired by carvings from the pre-Aztec Mexican city of Teotihuacan, artist Joel Murphy gave us the sketch of the stone dragon heads that represent Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan, the teacher-prophet legendary to so many ancient American societies. They are intended to suggest the book’s theme of the fated return of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulcan and other figures in world tradition that the author takes to be analogous. They are connected by Gerald Halligan’s elongated serpent-forms to his sketch of the Mayan temple. The skull is the image of the Mitchell-Hedges Skull which Martha Bouquin has used digitally several times.

__________________



image15.jpg

The Nazca geoglyphs/Moche Decapitator banner used to introduce the chain of events involving the agent Jason Jonas in Peru: All images were drawn by Gerald Halligan based on aerial photographs of the Nazca plain and Moche representations of their zoomorphic sacrificial god called the X-Sacrificer and the Spider Decapitator, among other things. The Heron images flanking the Decapitator mask are meant to tribute the Iroquoian symbol of the Great Blue Heron, the representative of the trait of vision that ought to go with society’s chiefs. They are placed at the top of the banner to maintain that theme of the higher level. The other images are meant to be sinister and are developed a bit more through imagery in the Peruvian chapters of Book Two.

__________________

Note: All these images are trademarked. No unsanctioned reuse of them is permitted. They were made in honor of Batavia, NY, dowser/teacher/U.S. Marine Ray Watson (1936-2014) – a friend of the author and two of the artists. Ray was as true a heart as could be found, and always a Marine. Numquam infidelis.



image2-2.png

Prologue

c. 12,000 BCE

The mysterious Crystal Skulls are created, possibly by one of the earliest Native cultures of Mesoamerica, possibly on the lost continent Atlantis, and possibly even in another star system. Formed of quartz crystal, exquisitely worked, and anatomically natural, the thirteen originals are considered objects of power which, according to prophecy, will bring about a great change in the world if they are ever brought together. The world today is flooded with imitations, and there is no certainty that any of the known skulls are original.

10,014 BCE (Traditional Date)

Atlantis, an island continent in the Atlantic Ocean said to have been the seed-culture of all civilizations in the Western Hemisphere, subsides quickly into the Atlantic Ocean. Some suspect that its obliteration could have come in conflict with an Eastern-Hemisphere civilization, the Rama Empire of western India, whose traces remain only as underwater ruins. It is conjectured that these ancient civilizations had technological achievement at least equal to that of contemporary ones, but using energy sources that were not combustion-based: solar power, weather control, ESP, bio-engineering, geophysics, sound technology, antigravity technology, and crystals.

4004 BC/3113 BCE (Traditional Possible Dates)

On August 13 in what the cyclical Aztec calendar remembers as a One-Reed year, a bearded, light-skinned stranger from over the ocean touches down in Mexico, bringing with him new insights, new arts, and new technology. Aztec tradition remembers him as Quetzalcoatl, Feathered Serpent, and he was said to have visited a number of societies in Central and South America. This legend exists in so many widely-separated Native American cultures that most ethnologists believe it has some basis in fact.

1500 BC-400 BCE

The presumed seed-culture for all Mesoamerica, the Olmec civilization surfaces, thrives and lapses in the Yucatan Peninsula along the Gulf of Mexico. Wondrous carvers and sculptors, the Olmec were known for enigmatic artifacts including: the Olmec heads, multi-ton carvings seeming to portray individuals of non-Native American ancestries, some of them dead ringers for Africans; marvelously evocative human statuettes, many of which suggest an off-continent, possibly Asian influence; and repeated depictions of the eerie character often called, the were-jaguar. Evidently a key player of the still-mysterious Olmec religion, this metamorphosing figure of the were-jaguar shows human and animal features and is often portrayed as an infant.

273 BCE

Disgusted by the bloodshed in the last war he has won, the Emperor Ashoka of India founds the society of The Nine Unknown Men, nine geniuses in varied disciplines whose original goals may have been to protect humanity’s most advanced wisdom against the vagaries of history and societal collapse. Some assert that this order could still be operating, possibly under some or all of its original members who have mastered the secret of extended life. Others suppose that the society’s manifestations in the world could sometimes be mistaken for those of a rival group suspected of being followers of the split-personed Hindu goddess Kali.

100-800 AD

The pre-Incan Moche culture flowers along the coast of northern Peru and develops a sacrificial cult unparalleled in the Andes. Their pottery and temple murals feature a zoomorphic, blood-drinking god sometimes called the X-Sacrificer or the Decapitator in several favored forms, some of them insectoid.

c. 800

Alarmed by the misuse of the power of the Crystal Skulls and aware due to prophecy of the coming of the Europeans, the Mesoamerican Native elders entrusted with their care begin to disperse them, presumably about the American continents.

900-1400

The human skull emerges as a motif and symbol among Mesoamerican societies. It figures broadly in the imagery of all art forms as well as numerical systems and written characters.

950

As a young man, Gerbert d'Aurillac, the eventual Pope Sylvester II, spends time in India and returns to Europe with a divinatory object used to advise him for all his papacy. This strange artifact called the magic head disappears from history at his death.

1080

The small but influential society of Assassins is founded in northwestern Iran to protect the teachings and intelligentsia of the Nizari Ismailis, a branch of Shia Islam. While the key to their name is sometimes thought to be the word for the marijuana-derived substance hashish, the only thing clear is that some powerful drug experience was the focus of their initiations.

1099

The First Crusade succeeds in taking the Holy City, Jerusalem. Immediately upon discovering the ruins of Solomon’s Temple, nine powerful French aristocrats appoint themselves the Temple’s protectors and start rooting around in the foundations. Shortly after finding something, these nine form the society of The Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici). Fanatical warriors and eventually powerful bankers, this mostly French order is remembered to history as the Knights Templar. The Templars and their imitators adopt many features of Islamic paraphernalia and tradition.

1250

The Assassins are dispersed and presumably eradicated by the invading Mongols.

1304

French King Philip IV (the Fair) crushes the Poor Knights of Christ, the Crusader Order of Solomon’s Temple. Legend holds that the surviving Knights Templar had some connection with the New World and may have been the first historic Europeans to establish bases in North America. The confessions forced by Philip IV’s inquisitors include reports that the Templars’ rituals involved Baphomet, some sort of idol resembling a human head.

1356

The Thuggee cult of robber/murderers forms in India and may eventually be responsible for two million deaths. Never a military order, the Thugs operate almost exclusively through subtlety, surprise and infiltration. Their technique is strangulation, almost always with an innocuous-looking sash.

1519

The Spanish conquistador Hernan de Cortez lands on the Mexican coast on April 21, 1519, a One Reed year in the cyclical Aztec calendar, and begins his conquest of the Aztec Empire. Because of the year of his landing and his exotic appearance, Cortez is at first mistaken for the legendary Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl. Ironically, the final surrender of the Aztec in their capital Tenochtitlan falls on August 13, the traditional day of Quetzalcoatl’s Mexican touchdown.

1687

French Gouverneur the Marquis de Denonville launches a punitive expedition against the Iroquoian Seneca nation at their settlements along the Genesee River near today’s Rochester, NY. The pivotal clash takes place at the town Gannogaro, which the French and allied forces sack and burn. While the goal of the mission is still debated, Gannogaro was the sanctuary and maybe the gravesite of the legendary figure called the Peace Queen, a sort of secretary-general to a Native American United Nations. Still one of the Senecas’ most holy places, Gannogaro is today preserved as the recreated community park called Ganondagan.

1700s

In a mountain rain forest near Bambamarca, Peru, an affable group remembered only as the Indios de Lomas have gotten along with all the overlords of their region, including the Moche, the Chimu, the Inca, and the supplanting Spaniards. Still, at some point in the 18th century, a number of their villages collapse under the pressure of the sudden appearance of mysterious beings that prey upon their young. The records do not specify whether this involves all children, the unborn, or the newborn. The villages empty, and the Lomas people leave the troublesome valley.

1830s

With Native Indian allies, the British Empire suppresses the Cult of Thuggee. The Thugs were presumed worshippers of Kali, the Hindu Goddess in her dark form, but this does not explain all their actions or their apparent Islamic influences.

1893

Stereotyped as more showman than scholar, American businessman Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) founds the Arts & Crafts Movement community Roycroft in East Aurora, NY. Hubbard develops a still-standing campus of medievalesque buildings, a network of eclectic friends, and the closeted reputation of an interest in occult disciplines, including Rosicrucianism.

1903

Work at the eventual site of the Mexico City airport unearths a statue of the Aztec sacrificial goddess Coatlicue (Ko-at-LEE-quay), She of the Serpent Skirt. Considering it too hideous to be viewed, the authorities of the day order it quickly reburied.

1913/1914

Still-hale at the age of 71, American journalist and occult writer Ambrose Bierce leads a large, armed-to-the-teeth expedition into the state of Chihuahua during the Mexican Civil War. No convincing explanation has ever been given for its mission or its complete disappearance. The eventual discoverer of the most famous Crystal Skull – author and explorer Frederick Mitchell-Hedges – is in Mexico at the time, and his record of encountering Bierce late in 1914 becomes the last credible clue to his fate.

1914

Remembered as Adolph Hitler’s evil tutor, Karl Hausofer was the son of Germany’s ambassador to Mexico, where he receives some exposure to Native tradition and access to a powerful psychotropic drug presumed today to have been peyote. Hitler’s experiences with this drug and Hausofer’s geopolitical theories would play a large part in the development of the Third Reich.

1915

Roycroft founder Elbert Hubbard is lost and presumed dead after the sinking of the Lusitania. His reasons for journeying to Europe during the rage of World War I are mysterious. While Hubbard’s avowed purpose was to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II and stop the war, rumor holds that he was headed for a different meeting. Later the same year the world’s most prominent Rosicrucian society reforms under the acronym AMORC (The Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross).

1916

With five American divisions poised in support at the Texas border, General John Pershing leads a 12,000 man foray into Mexico. A search for Pancho Villa is the official explanation, but the rebel is hard to miss at the time, and many believe that Pershing was after something else.

1924

At the Maya site of Lubantuun in Belize, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges uncovers the most impressive of the known Crystal Skulls, the so-called Skull of Doom, with its detachable lower jaw made from the same block of quartz crystal. Currently on semi-permanent display in Chesterton, Indiana, the Mitchell-Hedges Skull is lifelike enough to be reconstructed into the face of a woman of apparently Polynesian ancestry.

1926-present

The man whom Stephen King called, the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale, H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) develops a unique motif in macabre fantasy based on the Great Old Ones, a pseudomythological pantheon of demonic, extra-terrestrial beings at work behind the world’s most sinister evils. Presuming it nothing more than fantasy, Lovecraft and the writers of his circle – like Robert Bloch, Algernon Blackwood, August Derleth, Fritz Lieber, and Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard – gleefully perpetuate the Lovecraft Mythos, [also called, "the Cthulhu Mythos, so named for Cthulhu (Ka-THOO-loo), its chief demon]. In the 1930s, though, Lovecraft is astonished to start receiving fan letters from a loner in Buffalo, NY, pronouncing him a prophet. A night watchman and amateur antiquarian, William Lumley (1880-1940) insists to Lovecraft that he has struck truth with his themes of occult orders, pre-human cities, power-icons, and the dreaded return of the Great Old Ones. Lumley has seen the signs, he writes, in Western New York, which may even host a portal to that horrid other realm. Lumley’s only published story, The Diary of Alonzo Typer," appears in 1938 in Weird Tales magazine. It is set near Attica, NY, thirty miles east of Buffalo.

1938 -1945

One of the Third Reich’s least appreciated penchants is its search for legendary occult objects, including the Spear of Destiny, the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. Sacred dates fit into the mix. Hitler dies on April 30, 1945 – May Eve/Walpurgisnacht.

1945

The only Masonic order of American origin, the Order of Quetzalcoatl, is formed in Mexico City by an American World Ward II veteran, Arthur J. Elian.

1970s -1990s

Tourist disappearances along the Tex-Mex border spark rumors of a cult of witches recreating old Mesoamerican sacrificial rites.

1973

Speechless, sightless, tattered street people begin to be reported in various parts of the world.

1988

Serial murders break out in Rochester, NY, an exact century after Jack the Ripper’s London season. Francis Tumblety, a Rochester native, was one of the likeliest suspects for the original Ripper. The name on the family marker in Rochester’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery is strangely misspelled: Tumuelty.

1994

A mysterious object is discovered near Victor, NY by Native American staff at the preserved Seneca community and park today called Ganondagan (the site of the former Gannogaro). The object itself is spirited away (most likely to the nearest Seneca reservation, the Tonawanda) and all mention of the incident is quickly hushed. There are rumors that the item is composed of quartz crystal, and that it is an artifact.

1995

A strangely-dressed, undernourished, middle-aged man is found along a country road in Clarence, NY, shot dead with a deer rifle from long range. Of Middle Eastern ancestry, he had been blind. His eyes had been burned or bored out sometime in his twenties. He was wearing a simple rag across his unusually-healed sockets.

1999

Under the pen-name Mason Winfield, Ward Courier, an independent-school English teacher and paranormal buff from Buffalo, NY, publishes A Ghosthunter’s Journal. The author considers the thirteen stories to be no more than fictional embellishments of local urban legends and witness accounts of paranormal events.

2002

A psychologist in Amherst, NY, interviews a patient with repressed memories of The Whistlers, an order of blind, telepathic assassins.

2005

The Drug Enforcement Administration hears of a new substance making its appearance in the United States. Its varied nicknames include savvy, goo, grey, and know-know. Its unprecedented psychotropic effects may include access to the hidden corners of the mind and even the activation of ESP. Suspected of South American origin, its distribution hub seems to be in Buffalo, NY.

2006

The Federal Bureau of Investigation begins to trail a violent, high-stakes smuggling ring that deals in Native American antiquities.

2007

A crystal artifact, an anatomically perfect human lower jaw, turns up in southwestern Ohio. Soon after it surfaces on the underground antiquities market, its vendors – three pothunters – are found dead, bearing the signs of a brutal interrogation.

2007

Law enforcement agencies in Buffalo, NY, begin a series of interviews with Ward Courier about incidents that seem to be foreshadowed by the stories in his book, A Ghosthunter’s Journal.

2008

In pursuit of an antiquities ring led by a former American college professor, a team of American undercover agents come upon a compound near San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato province. They find a number of bodies but no cult-leader.

2009

In Mexico’s Chiapas province, a team of anthropologists reports the discovery of a new, perfectly formed crystal skull, replete with detachable jaw, in a ruined city, then disappears.

2009

In Mexico’s Chiapas province, a team of American agents comes upon a deserted estate, replete with ancient statuary and a tzompantli, an Aztec-style skull rack holding dozens of human skulls, most of them at least decades old and some only days old. The freshest heads appear to be those of the cultists who had maintained the rack and supplied it with the rest. A surveillance video contains only one seemingly impossible clue to their killer.

2010

Anthropologists near Cayabamba, Peru, find a mass graveyard by a Moche temple at the foot of a mountain fifty miles inland from the Moche’s traditional coastal home. They tunnel into an elite tomb near a ruined pyramid dedicated to an insectoid vampire-god and uncover odd artifacts.

The Present

In a mountain range along the Indo-Pakistani border, The Old Man of the Mountain – a blind, ageless mystic – sleeps in a pose of prayer that has lasted, they say, since the Crusades. Sometimes he laughs in his dreams, they say, as he surely did on September 11, 2001.



image9-1.png



image2.png

The Whistlers: A Paranormal Intrigue

Chapter One

The Skull of Doom

EPISODES

1-8

SPRING & SUMMER

2007

__________________



image16.jpg

1

Episode of Team 8

Buffalo Niagara International Airport

Buffalo, NY

A plane touches down at the Buffalo airport on a brilliant late spring morning. Among the passengers filing down the boarding chute is an attractive young woman with her dark hair worn in a short pony tail. She wears a slinky, sleeveless fog-grey dress that seems to be made of Lycra. She wears light, wraparound, oil-black sunglasses that reveal nothing of her eyes. She pays no attention to anyone around her. She carries a light purse and strides purposefully past the baggage claim. She cuts across the airport’s human traffic in her high heels and makes straight for the bright automatic doors that lead to the curving, six-laned passenger pickup roadway outside.

The young woman takes a look to her left, then to her right. She spots a shiny silver convertible Mercedes and strides to it. Parked in a prime reserved taxi stand, its top is down and its key is in the ignition. The woman looks to an awning fifty feet to her right back toward the terminal. She spots a tall dreadlocked black man in glasses much like her own leaning against a column. The pair seem to trade glances. Then the young woman tosses the purse into the passenger seat, opens the driver-side door, gets in, starts the car, and heads out aggressively.

She soon comes to a freeway and accelerates as if discontent with the pace of traffic. Her hair is down. The sun falls on her. She’s a stunner, with a straight profile and sharp, classic features. Her bare arms are lean but strong-looking. Muscles ripple as she turns the wheel.

She drives on an expressway through a city. Her brow is intent but untroubled, lost in focus on her driving. She soars over raised turnpikes and dives under bridges.

She is impatient and aggressive, weaving through lane after lane to make ever more headway. She looks quietly furious with a slow driver in the left lane of a three-lane expressway. She pulls through the middle lane, speeds through a gap into the right, slows quickly, pulls back into the middle lane behind an SUV, guns it, and shoots the gap between it and the slow vehicle in the left lane, missing its bumper by inches. At least one horn resounds sourly. Her expression doesn’t change. It is one of attention and focus. She fires off beyond them all.



image16.jpg

2

Episode of Team 8

The East Side, Buffalo, NY

It is early afternoon. The dark-haired woman in the silver Mercedes comes to a depressed section of a city. Many buildings are abandoned. The few active businesses sport chipped, faded signs.

In a block of mostly residential houses whose better days were a century in the past, the woman comes to a broad, two-story Victorian-era factory building that like many in Buffalo must once have been served by horses. She pulls the Mercedes over the crumbling curb and parks in a dusty lot in the building’s shadow. Her silver vehicle looks odd near the two rusted hulks under the shelter of a low, flat-roofed, open-air shed.

Three young black men lounge about in strategic positions, all in sun-proof eyewear. All wear voluminous vests and loose cargo pants that could easily conceal objects. Two rest in folding porch chairs on opposite ends of the roof of the shed, listening to music so loud that we can hear its drone and percussion through their headphones. They sun themselves and enjoy the day. The third sits on an outdoor lounge chair at ground level. He is a big, powerful-looking fellow in bulky camo shorts and a grey tank top. He approaches as the young woman gets out.

I have a meeting with T-Shaka, says the young woman.

T-Shock doan mine waitin’, says the young man. His voice is high for someone so big.

I have something just for T-Shaka, she says firmly. The big man smiles and takes hold of her left wrist.

You really need to focus, she says. T-Shaka is expecting me.

One of the other men gets up, trots down a short wooden staircase, approaches, and takes the woman’s other hand. They start to usher her toward the low storage area. In seconds she will be within the building.

The woman bends her head down over her necklace. Yellow. Shit, she says clearly and sourly.

The man holding her right hand smiles quizzically. His head explodes, and a quick chugging sound is heard just after. People appear as if out of nowhere.

A young woman in fatigues and a Kevlar vest leaps out from the other side of the building with a Glock-9 pistol held in two hands, a long suppressor stretching from it. She wears a small hands-free mike and earphones. Fucking freeze it! she says harshly. Her voice could break glass. The man on the roof stands and reaches for something in his vest. She fires at him three quick times. From the way his falling form lurches in the air we judge that he’s hit at least twice by an unseen shooter. He crumples and drops.

From a low window on the third floor of the building just before them, three men leap, one after the other, onto the roof of the two-story building beside it. We see only the tops of their bodies as they drop through the space, and once they land, they are invisible. Footsteps can be heard, with the repeated metallic cough of a silenced rifle.

A third young woman in dark glasses, a baseball hat, and a kevlar vest comes from the other side of the building, holding a pistol like her other colleagues, looking at all its fronts. There is no way behind the building into the alleys, yards, or corridors of the former industrial complex along which the three fugitives must still be running. Shhhhhhhhit! she says into her head phones.

A young white man in a kevlar vest pops up out of a garbage can behind them and runs like mad, pistol in hand, around the block to head off the fleeing men. He stops at the corner, presses his earpiece, and talks. Then he crouches and aims with two hands on the gun.



image16.jpg

3

Episode of Team 8

The East Side, Buffalo, NY

Two young black men are standing against the wall of an old garage, their hands behind their heads, their sports lenses on the gravel below them. One of them we have seen before. The red-haired woman in fatigues sits on a barrel, pistol in hand, talking on a cell phone. A big young dreadlocked black man sits on a folding chair against a far wall, a semiautomatic carbine resting on his lap. It has a red-dot sight on it and, like all the other guns here, a smoke-colored suppressor that makes the barrel look much longer.

The dark-haired woman we saw driving the Mercedes paces before the two standing men. You blew two years of work, you know, she says, her hair just hitting her shoulders. A forelock covers one eye, and she puffs it aside. Two years. Mister Macho. You break in all the women for T-Shaka, don’t you? You’re really Mister Macho, aren’t you?

The woman in the vest stands and steps forward. Her frizzy red pony tail sticks out the back panel of her black, unadorned baseball cap. She has thick, muscular arms. Give me an excuse to fucking kill you! she says. Go for my piece! Go for something! Make any kind of move! Give me an excuse! She points her pistol.

What you doing with us? says the man on the right against the wall.

Give a brother a break, says the one on the left. We’ll talk to a brother. We didn’t know you had a brother. Just get her to chill.

The black agent rests his carbine and comes up to them. He wears jeans, a T-shirt and a bulletproof vest. He looks about thirty. Like the women, he has an earpiece. He’s tall and well built, with wide shoulders and lats. He’s got the body of a linebacker or tight end. He stands before the two men as if considering their offer. He gets close to the one on his left as if about to speak to him confidentially. Then he gives him a brutal knee to the groin, which drops him. He knees the other one in the gut. The man leans forward and clutches him like a long lost friend before falling to the floor under a couple of expert blows from fists and forearms. The tall agent has clearly had martial arts training.

You’re going to tell us everything, says the dark-haired woman, pacing above their crumpled forms. Every last little thing.

I just want to kill them! snarls the red-haired woman. Let’s fucking kill them!

You can’t kill them if they talk to us, says the dark-haired woman impatiently. Still... Two years...

Let’s make them talk to us and then kill them, says the red-haired woman, and one of the men on the ground moans.

We go through this every time, says the dark-haired woman in the tone of a teacher reiterating the most basic point of a lesson. If we kill them, we can’t come back and get them if they lied to us.

Two fucking years, says the red-haired woman.

Maybe there’s a way to work with these guys, says the dark-haired woman. Keep ‘em on the outside where they can help us down the road.

You heard them, says the dreadlocked agent above the two groaning culprits. They’ll talk for a brother. Let’s have a brotherly little talk. See if we can figure out where T-Shaka’s got himself off to. See if we can figure out where he gets his contraband happy goo.



image17.jpg

4

Episode of Jason Swingo Jonas

Heath, Ohio

A middle-sized young white man enters a sparely-furnished, ample-sized room lit brightly from overhead. He carries a briefcase like a lawyer coming to a meeting. His stylish sports lenses make him look professorial, and he is dressed like a teacher walking between classes on a crisp New England day: a white button-down shirt, khaki pants, and a charcoal herringbone blazer that could be a Harris tweed. On top of it all is a black vest with many pockets that surge as though holding a few hard, dense objects. He pulls up a rolling chair and drapes the vest over its back rest.

The room appears to be the conference space of an industrial building. It holds only a wastebasket; a broad, heavy table; and a dozen chairs about it. At the middle of the table sits a large, broad, powerful-looking man. He has curly dark hair and a short beard and mustache. His forehead has a bruise. He wears a Cleveland Browns sweatshirt partly torn at the neck, revealing a T-shirt likewise torn. Curly chest hair sprouts above it. The man’s forearms are extended across the table, each wrist wearing a plastic, police-style handcuff, the other link of which is laced through the long cable of a bike lock fixed at each end to a leg of the table.

The slender man hangs his jacket on top of the chair that holds the vest, then gives it a tap with his foot and watches it roll across the room to a gentle stop against the wall. With vest and jacket off, he looks even smaller. He looks