The ghosts come out at night, child. Except here they are not really ghosts but the eyes of this place. In the silent hall, under the broken dome, when all of you lie asleep, fallen where you will in your fatigue, waiting to be resurrected in the morning. Then the ghost images. In a spectrum of light you cannot see. The history of this place, recollected: Held by some for a time. Driven out. Another group replacing them. Such repetition for so long, the only difference in the details of the conquest, the defeat.

But all along at dusk, in the shadows, my kind slinking through. My kind emerging from the tunnels below. The ones you never saw, making our own history, creating our own lives. Unrecorded.

And me, nailed to the wall, neither alive nor quite yet dead. I look down Charlie X as the ghosts move through him, look down upon the human shadows as the past becomes brazen in that space. Violence here happened so long ago, the motion of the past come to life like some long dance no one realized they were part of. I wonder if killing you would have been better than slinking nocturnal, but, then, you killed yourselves anyway. We just needed to survive long enough, sacrifice more. Charlie X was never pragmatic like a fox, never aware like a fox.

Sometimes this resurrection is peaceful in its way, because the violence in it happened so long ago. I feel this way when the need to rest comes over me. The motion of all the past come to life is like some long dance the dancers don’t realize is in motion. Even the killing. Even the strife. So silent in this place. So still. In the end.

The irony that I am changed enough, child. Changed that much. That I must tell this to you. Must snare your mind in it, in the hope that, someday, you’ll see a fox or a track and you’ll write it all down. You’ll pass it down somehow. That somehow it will matter.

But that will never happen. I won’t have to rely on that. You’ll grow old or you won’t. But one day or night, you’ll lay your head down to sleep and you won’t wake up and in time, through worm and fly, through scavenger and rot … your skull will be laid bare, and there, on the bone, they’ll find my story, not yours.

This story. From the beginning.

A blinding blue star over the desert, shining down on all. Shining down for just a moment. Shining down eternal.