The Mad and the Macabre

Epilogue

Jess held Gabriel’s hand as together they stood before the crimson spring, looking up toward the mountain peak where the cross had been erected to memorialize their vanished siblings. They had just mounted another placard beneath the first to commemorate the more recent lives that had been lost in the search for their missing family members. The warm June sun shined down on them in slanted rays through the wavering branches of the ponderosa pines. Only spotted patches of snow remained beneath the densest thickets. Otherwise, the ground was dry, the kindling and leaves crackling as they rustled on the slight breeze. Soon enough, the rains would come, heralding winter’s inevitable return. This was their window of opportunity.

The Search & Rescue copper had airlifted them down from the mountain the following day as soon as the storm had broken. Jess and Gabriel had joined the police, FBI, and countless volunteers over the ensuing week in a futile search for Maura Aragon, Brent Cavenaugh, Will Farnham, and Kelsey Northcutt. None of their bodies were ever found and they were eventually written off as victims of the cruel mountain and the wicked storm. It happens in the Rocky Mountains every year, the authorities had said. Eventually, their remains would be found.

Gabriel was certain they never would.

They had rolled a number of stones into the hole above the spring where Oscar had entered, sealed it with gravel and dirt, and wedged the largest stone they could lift over the top. That had been two days ago. Ever since, they had done nothing but roll boulder after boulder into the spring to block off the underwater tunnel. The red water now overflowed the granite banks and cut twin streams to either side down the slope.

No one would ever again set foot inside that mountain. No one would ever learn the secret that had cost so many lives. The lies would pass through countless more generations, but hope would persevere as a corollary of the deception.

Levi had been wrong.

Stephanie would never have told. To her, hope and faith were synonymous.

And to honor her memory, he would now protect the faith of millions.

“Are you ready?” Jess asked.

Gabriel nodded, and squeezed her hand.

They turned away from the distant silhouette of the cross and the amassed rocks that now clogged the spring, and began their descent of Mount Isolation for the final time.

***

Gabriel sat on the couch with his laptop on the coffee table in front of him. Beyond that small screen was the much larger television, which Jess watched from the kitchen behind him while she doled out the Mongolian beef and Szechuan chicken onto plates from the take-out containers. He heard the clatter of plates on the eating bar and smelled the divine mixture of aromas. Oscar had taken notice as well. Despite his useless rear leg, he managed to leap out of Gabriel’s lap and scamper around the couch to entangle himself in Jess’s feet.

“Ready to take a break for dinner?” she asked, massaging Gabriel’s shoulders to make sure she had his attention. Oscar meowed and pawed at her legs until she picked him up.

“Yeah. I just need a couple more minutes…”

His voice trailed off.

The rerun of Seinfeld had been interrupted by another news flash showing aerial coverage of the fire in Rocky Mountain National Park, which had now been burning for more than seventy-two hours. They speculated it may have been caused by a lightning strike, or perhaps a carelessly discarded cigarette butt. Either way, it made Gabriel nervous. Thirty-five hundred acres had already been consumed. The remote location and steep slopes, coupled with the gusting winds, made the fire nearly impossible to contain. Pine Springs had been evacuated the day before and the highway closed to all but emergency personnel. Pockets of fire burned from the scorched earth while a halo of towering flames advanced outward in all directions. The image zoomed out to encompass the greatest extent of the damage. The sharp topography of the mountains looked like the landscape of another planet entirely. Rugged peaks and chiseled valleys aligned in such a way that they almost looked like a—

“Jesus,” Gabriel whispered.

He leaned forward, grabbed the remote from the table, and paused the picture on the screen with the aid of the DVR. Carefully, he saved the paper he had been preparing on the unclassified species of salt-loving microorganism he had been writing for publication in the Journal of Bacteriology of the American Society for Microbiology entitled “On a New Species of Haloarchaea: H. stephanii,” and typed in a quick internet search. He breezed through the sites until he found what he was looking for, and enlarged the image to fill the small screen. It was an image of the surface of the Cydonia region of Mars as captured by Michael Malin’s Mars Orbiter Camera in 2001, the infamous “Face on Mars.”

Gabriel glanced from the monitor to the frozen picture on the TV, then back again. Over and over.

It was the same face, the same seemingly natural alignment of peaks and valleys on planets separated by hundreds of thousands of miles.

The same gaunt, desiccated face into which he had stared in a cobweb-riddled cockpit in the heart of Mount Isolation.

The true visage of God.