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As I limped northwest toward the rendezvous, my feet and shins ached. I’d bumped against the side of the pool with significantly greater force than I’d reckoned during the initial excitement. The entrance fee to life isn’t steep. The micro-transactions are what eventually kill you.

I hadn’t gone a dozen steps before I noticed the graffiti. Sprayed on the sloping wall with alternating black-and-white paint. Arrows (singles and clusters), quadrilaterals, trapezoids, crescents, and triangles were plain. Infrequent, slashed into rock, directional. Then frequent, degenerative, and splashed onto girders, the ceiling. Neat trick, that last detail, as the roof vaulted nearly two stories high at its apex. Geometric symbols segued to gibberish symbols and these composed a gibberish language.

The headlamp brightened, dimmed, brightened in a nauseating cycle. No phone, no radio, a flaky light source, and weird damn graffiti. A bizarre day kept getting stranger, for which I had no one to blame except Isaiah Coleridge. I congratulated myself that at least the symbols weren’t threatening or satanic. Who’d decorated the tunnel? I’d already discounted teenagers and disaffected locals. The scenery changed as I proceeded. Geometric designs and vaguely Nordic runes were superseded by those stickmen I’d seen around town and environs. Stickmen hunting. Stickmen congregating in caves, bowed in worship. Basking in the veneration of the stickmen were variations of the demonic creatures—the prodigious heads with T. rex appendages and gaping jaws—displayed on the Nameless Field mural. These monstrosities squatted beneath black-and-white disks of sun and moon that overlapped like empty Venn diagrams. The sketches were contemporary, yet, as with the other examples I’d witnessed, emanated antiquity. A mind preoccupied with old, old sentiments guided the hand of this artist, or artists.

Herzog’s theories regarding the site might not be so fantastical.

Lamenting my inability to snap photos, I vowed to locate and interview Sean Pruitt’s buddies Buckhalter and Thorpe at my earliest convenience. Someone with personal knowledge of the site was damn well going to tell me what the Redlick Group and a cabal of government scientists had had on their minds. Atom-smashing, particle physics, and quantum what-the-fuck-ever aside, the multitude of spooky vibes I’d gotten since day one suggested an agenda quite divorced from pop science. Or any science. It stank of alchemy and the occult, which is to say, black magic hoodoo, and like the rest of the bad ideas of ye olden times, the provincial superstition powering those avenues of human inquiry usually portended trouble for everyone outside the inner circle of trust.

Strangeness performed a flying trapeze leap to the outright bizarre. I entered a section of improved tunnel that extended for roughly two hundred yards; here a foundation was poured and a metal sheath inserted. Panels, sockets, and a narrow channel that traveled the floor and ceiling waited eternally to be fitted with circuit boards, lighting fixtures, and the main conducting rails of the particle accelerator. I had a glimpse at what might’ve resembled a final working product. The whole tube was painted in swirling patterns and recurring motifs of primitive animism. More thunderbirds and terrible faces; more stickmen and contemporary petroglyphs depicting animals and celestial bodies. Alternating tiger stripes of white and black created a disconcerting optical effect of the tunnel revolving. This mural couldn’t be considered graffiti by any means. Far too sophisticated. Service doors were slotted intermittently, camouflaged by the artwork. I lay my hand flat against one door and swore it thrummed as if transmitting a faint vibration of heavy machinery. The metal tube ended and I stepped down into watery muck and rudely hacked earth.