(Former) Archaeologist's Lament Addendum

Excerpt from THE NEXT COMING RACE (as yet unpublished).

Pot hunters held rave-type, secretive, pic-nic-style parties, complete with bar-b-ques and beer, on little known or overlooked archaeological sites. They socialized, ate a good meal, and then broke out the shovels, leaving behind a landscape so littered and cratered you'd think you'd landed on a mock-up of the moon.

I suppose what happened next was my fault. Goaded by the wealth of my online data mining and the voracity with which we’d hatched the previous night’s plan, I emailed the others with my findings, urging them to follow through with our stratagem.

It got exciting two months later. One of the pot hunters suggested they get together and investigate an abandoned and soon to be demolished property south of Stouffville. They used SurveyMonkey to determine the best date and settled on having a tailgate-style dinner prior to the dig. Undaunted by the sheer gall of what the pot hunters had suggested, I emailed every one of the original archaeologists. None of us had the slightest clue as to how to proceed. We knew that prosecuting the buggers would be a difficult task—to date, there had been only one case of successful prosecution documented. The solution, we all agreed, was to be on hand to disperse the rave and then hightail it to the Ministry of Culture to register the site.

So we’d have some official capacity, we’d enlisted Michael’s assistance whose job it would be to flash his badge and look menacing, no grand feat for Michael who had the physique of a well-padded football player and the sombre, stoic gaze of a Terminator on a mission permanently tattooed onto his face.

On the date in question, we caught the looters with their metaphoric pants down, munching on ribs and chicken, guzzling beer and Coke by the cans-full. We drove up the dirt access road at dusk, circled them with our vehicles and parked with our brights on. Mesmerized to paralysis at first, the looters presently scrambled, Hibachis and shovels clanging as they were thrown into the beds of their pickups. One by one they snaked between our cars and drove away.

Our group had participated in no less than three such raids since.

To have that power, to be able to do something to protect our passion from marauders, was exhilarating, if not entirely legal. To that end, we swore each other to secrecy, vowing only ever to meet clandestinely, and only when dictated by the slightly lesser legal activities of our pot-hunting nemeses.

The ghost town of Ballycroy in the northern GTA was our first failure. I’d been monitoring online chatter for weeks, trying to pinpoint the message containing the exact date and time of the party. Once I’d found it, I’d marked it on my smart phone’s calendar. Busy at school, I hadn’t gone back to check for revisions. At some point between entering it into my calendar and the scheduled date, the pothunters had changed their meeting and I’d missed it.

After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence between us I said, “I fucked up big.”

“Come on, Moll,” Palmer said, “you had no way to know.”

“I need to put Vash’s email on my cell,” I said. Vash, the archaeologist-slash-profiteer character from Star Trek: the Next Generation, was the pseudonym I adopted in the pot hunting chat rooms. “If I’d thought of it sooner, I wouldn’t have missed the time change.”

“Hindsight is 20/20,” Michael said.

“Really, Michael?” I said. “Platitudes? Now?”

“Say, is there any cream?” Michael asked. He left the table and took his coffee with him.

“You need to calm down, Moll,” Palmer told me. “Stop beating yourself up.” I looked deep into his dark eyes and saw the calm I sought. How was he able to slough off what had happened so easily? Probably because he wasn’t on point for plan-making. “Crestwood means well, you know he does.” Palmer reached out and pried my hand from the near death-grip it had around the coffee cup, and squeezed.

When Michael returned to the table I apologized.

We agreed I would be the one to go to the Ministry office first thing the next day and register the site. Not that it would stop future looters from spoiling the archaeological record, but if we were ever going to see these guys prosecuted, it was the first step.

About the Author
Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

PHASE SHIFT - Prologue

Here is the Prelude, the first chapter of my novel PHASE SHIFT.


Enjoy.

I am laying in the dark listening to my husband’s raspy almost-snore, unable to sleep. To keep myself occupied, I try to remember when I first knew I wanted to be an archaeologist.

After seeing the first Indiana Jones movie as a teenager, perhaps? No, Indy merely served to bolster my interest in the field. The real turning point came while watching a documentary called “In Search of Noah’s Ark” when I was no more than twelve, back in the time before the super cinemas. It was then, I knew. Wood decomposed to nothing but dark shadows in the soil, aerial photographs of well-fed vegetation, and measurements approximating those in The Bible—I still shudder in awe at the thought of it.

My first real taste of archaeology was in the middle of a conservation area almost an hour’s drive north of the city: dark soil dampening trouser knees and buttocks, dirt rammed under fingernails, blowing out a peppering of dust mixed with snot on the Kleenex—man! I was hooked.

A few years later I was near graduation and looking toward grad school. Dr. Richardson, the head of the Archaeology department, offered to be my faculty advisor and I accepted without hesitation. He assigned me a site, the remains of a carriage house behind a restored clapboard house, built nearly two centuries ago. The planning, supervision, excavation and analysis of the site over two years’ time would earn me my Master’s degree.

My assistants and I arrived at the house, to find Dr. Richardson sitting on the stoop reading Scientific American, anissue featuring an article about a cache of Peruvian mummies. Dr. Richardson is a forensic anthropologist. That means he gets off on dead people and figuring out how they died. He works extensively with the police, to give them clues as to what decomposed bodies and skeletons might have looked like while they were still living and breathing.

We approached the stoop and he stood to greet us. I had to crane my neck and shield my eyes from the sun in order to meet his gaze. He smiled at me, said hello and squeezed my shoulder. My stomach lurched. Dr. Richardson is what we used to call “a hunk”. The first time my mother met him she called him “a dreamboat” and said she wouldn’t throw him out of her bed for eating crackers. The way things turned out, that comment was so many different levels of wrong.

The house was converted to a living museum sometime in the late eighties. The side entrance, added on around the same time, smelled of new carpet and fresh paint. Pictures of the house in various stages of disrepair and renovation hung on the walls like windows into the past. Dr. Richardson gave us the grand tour: men’s parlor, women’s sitting room, dining room, upstairs ballroom, and nurseries. A narrow staircase took us up to the third floor servants’ quarters.

Back downstairs, Dr. Richardson showed us the kitchen. The walls were of unfinished wood made dark by soot. At the centre of one wall was the original hearth, complete with bake ovens. A single wooden table stood in the middle of the room, deeply scarred through use and over time, and in the far corner, the kitchen pantry, converted to a small storage-cum-utility closet after the restorations. Near the ceiling Dr. Richardson pointed to a series of wallpaper layers. He recited each occupation and era by rote and I was in awe of him.

He finished his lecture and ushered us out of our cramped quarters. I chanced a glance up at him and he smiled at me. A perfect three-toed crow’s foot appeared to frame the outer edge of each of his eyes. The solitary, unshaded light bulb that dimly lit the room shone in his dark eyes—a girl could get lost in those eyes. I blushed, embarrassed at the lust I felt for him at that moment, chastising myself for falling for my faculty advisor. But then I reminded myself that Dr. Richardson was a good sixteen years’ my senior, and everyone knew he was seeing Suzanne Pascoe, the Egyptologist. Dr. Richardson was safe, like a movie star. Like a movie star, he was unattainable, and consequently, not entirely real. I told myself the crush would pass, and it eventually did.

Palmer’s snoring again. I nudge him, tell him to roll over, then roll over myself, wedging one hand between his rib cage and the mattress and one foot arch-deep between his thighs. He doesn’t protest.

Sleep has eluded me this evening. Pretty soon my bedside alarm will begin to shriek at me, signifying the start of yet another day. I need a drink. Tea would go down good right about now. Hot tea with honey and lemon.

In the kitchen I fill the kettle and plug it in. While I wait for the water to boil, I stroll into the living room and take a peek out the front window. Two black sedans are parked on the road, each facing opposite directions, waiting for me in case I decide to take it on the lam. Inside each car sits a pair of officers—which officers are out there tonight is anybody’s guess. The possibilities read like a who’s who for law enforcement: CIA, CSIS, OPP… It’s funny how quickly things spiral out of your control: yesterday I was an archaeology professor considering earning my doctoral degree. Today I am the prime suspect in a murder investigation.

The kettle begins to boil. I unplug it. Sometime between eying the sedans and thinking about the death I may have expedited, I’ve lost my appetite for tea.

I return to bed, drawing my body close to Palmer’s, more for security than warmth. I find solace in the fact I was right about one thing when I was struggling with that crush on my faculty advisor all those years ago: Palmer Richardson is safe.

The Seven Year Itch

Here is a cut scene from PHASE SHIFT. I wrote the novel over about 10 years before I self-published it this month. In that time, I had it vetted by writers in residence at the local library, workshopped it with my writer’s circle group, had it complimented and ripped mercilessly to shreds in the “Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Award” competion, and a good portion of it edited the “A Woman’s Write” contest. The largest re-write occured after I lost the “A Woman’s Write” competition to someone who was an accomplished playwright, but for whom this was her first novel. The feedback from that contest was to homogenize the narrative to use Molly’s voice only. Rather than make some scenes from Palmer’s and other’s points of view, I wrote any scenes that didn’t include Molly in third person. I think it made a huge difference for perspective consistency.


I took this one out primarily because it’s in Palmers voice, but also because I think I was trying to do too much in marrying the two planets. Everything from solar flares to UFO sightings to paranormal activity seems to increase in seven year increments, or so the story goes. This scene documents Molly’s and Palmer’s perspective on that statement.

Other similar pseudo-scientific beliefs have come to us by way of perfectly explainable Gaian phenomenon. The area on Earth known as the Bermuda Triangle, for example, has long been known on Gaia as an epicentre for shifts in the planet's phase. The area had been proclaimed somewhat of a disaster area around the middle of the twentieth century. Travelers wishing to fly over or pass through the area are cautioned to alter their trajectory, lest they never return. Ironic that the area has long been known as dangerous to traverse on Earth as well. Though the cause for the crashes and disappearances in the region are prolific, none of them speculate it to be what is essentially a glitch in the planet's electromagnetic field, let alone a link to a sister planet.

Further adding to the mystique imbued in the popular culture of pseudo-science is Reyes's observation that scientists who monitor reports of random phase shift bubbles account an increase in occurrence of the phenomenon every seven years. When Molly tells me this, I simply nod. She says nothing more, as if waiting for me to make the connection. I wrack my brain, but come up empty. "So?" I ask, prompting her to continue.

"So all sorts of things are reputed to happen in sevens on Earth. June bugs for one." My mother told me this once when I was young. June bugs seem to grow in number around year three or four of the cycle, reaching the height of their population around year seven. Following that, population frequency tends to die off until their numbers start to increase and the cycle repeats itself. "I remember reading once that reports of UFO sightings reach their peak every seven years, too," she continues. It's then I make the connection. If random phase bubbles increase every seven years, that means the chance for hovercrafts being caught up in the phase bubbles also increases every seven years. It stood to reason that UFO sightings would follow suit.

"And that's not all," Molly says. "According to Reyes's information, nuclear activity on Earth has dire consequences on Gaia. Their worst disaster—and I mean something along the lines of 911—happened on or about the same day as Chernobyl.”

Don’t forget to check out PHASE SHIFT, available on KoboBooks, Amazon.com, Lulu, and now at the iBookstore. My novella, THE MUMMY WORE COMBAT BOOTS is available at the same outlets, and should be at the iBookstore in about two weeks. If you’re unsure as to if this story is for you, please feel free to download the sneak peeks before you purchase.