Eyewitness Statement:

“‘Course I remember Old Sam Wilson. That crazy desert rat spent his whole life insisting there was still piles of silver and even gold in them thar hills. It didn’t matter he never found much. Once Sam got an idea in his head, there wasn’t any letting go.

Years ago, it was. A bunch of us drove out to the plateau to watch the lights in the sky. They’d been showing up night after night for a week, circling close to the ground. The sheriff said that’s how he’d conduct a search party if only he had something that could fly.

Sam tagged along to gawk too. Like a lot of us, he was overloaded on whisky. He’d been drinking all day for no good reason except he had money in his pocket, a rare lucky find of a few gold nuggets in a dry streambed. The lights got closer and he started hollering how he’d found alien gold and now they were looking for him to get it back. Sam never did make much sense when he’d been whiskying.

Then the lights got just too close to suit him. He screamed and took off for the hills like his ass was on fire. A few of us tried to catch him before he hurt himself, but the crazy old fool was going full stampede. He was gone when we got to the canyon. That’s nasty geography out there.

The sheriff formed a search party, and with tourists’ talent for finding trouble, we already knew most all places to check. We found Sam just after sunup. He’d plunged straight down an uncovered mine shaft and he was a real mess.

Everybody liked Sam but he never did let anyone get close. Still, he got a proper funeral even if it took a collection to do it up right, the kind of sendoff people talk about the rest of their lives. Sam deserved it, the old loco, crazy son of a bitch.

And that’s how Old Sam Wilson’s life came to its sudden sad end. I swear it all happened just the way I told it. Funny how it was followed up by that almighty monster of a lightning storm.”

 

Sam’s Story

 

I don’t remember all that much what happened…    The lights got to me. Maybe the whisky had something to do with it as well. Wouldn’t be the first time liquor turned on me. I just knew the lights were looking for me, so I ran for my life and totally forgot about that old played out Sun Lizard silver mine. Suddenly I was lying at the bottom of a fifty‑foot shaft. With the ladder long gone, I must have taken the shortcut.

I hope I got a decent funeral. I hope somebody turned up, even if just to make sure they were rid of me for good.

There was no question to my mind I was dead. I was instantly stone cold sober, and my head was a lot clearer than it had been in years. That’s when I figured out the lights hadn’t been looking for me. Stupid idea, aliens flying across the universe to get back a few goddamned gold nuggets. How stupid can one man get? In my experience, plenty.

But I wasn’t wrong thinking they were looking for something. Not me, certainly. Hell, they didn’t even know yet I existed.

Nothing really prepares you for being dead. You have to figure out the complications on your own. Turns out, death is a lot like a snake shedding its skin. The spirit or soul or ghost just slips loose, but, just like for snakes, things can go wrong.

In my case, most everything was slipped free. The last point of attachment was causing all the problems. Not for the first time in my life. That’s something you could ask Sue, my ex‑wife, about if you can find her. It hurt like a sonofabitch when I tried to pull loose. They tell you head into the light, but what are you supposed to do when there’s no light and your balls are still clinging to your body for all they’re worth? The one part of me that never did know when enough was enough and it was time to move on.   A sad and ridiculous situation.

I was feeling distinctly sorry for myself when a curious little sound came from one of the side tunnels. There were three of them, and though I hadn’t been down there in decades, the shaft was the only way into the Lizard that I knew, and those tunnels should be silent as tombs.

A bit of light came down the shaft at dawn. Voices far off were yelling my name. They’d be awhile finding me. Searchers check the obvious places first and leave the unlikely ones for last.

The sound came again. It didn’t sound human, but it sure as hell didn’t sound like anything else I knew either.

The searchers finally got to the Sun Lizard before much light was coming down the shaft, but they had flashlights. God, was that really me atop that pile of broken rubble? Now that I could get a good look, the fall had done a hell of a lot more damage that I’d imagined. They dropped a body bag, rigged some rope, and there they were.

Just before they tried to lift me off the rocks, I realized what was coming and begged them not to pull. They pulled anyway. Sure, I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear me though I screamed loud enough dogs back in town must have set to barking.

“Anyone hear anything?” Pete the Sheriff asked nonchalantly of nobody in particular.

“Lizards,” Dan the Barber suggested, chuckled, and pulled harder.

They didn’t hear that scream either.

When that little sound came again from one of the side tunnels, I was still the only one hearing it. Jesus, were the living deaf to everything?

“Broken pelvis,” the sheriff decided. “Wedged tight between the rocks. We’ll need to pry him loose.”

The sheriff sent up for a crowbar. The prospect wasn’t reassuring.

Whatever was in the side tunnel stirred again. How in hell could nobody hear that?

When the crowbar arrived ‑‑ way too quickly to my way of thinking ‑‑ there came without warning a moment of white‑hot agony that ended sudden as it began. My noncorporeal self just tore loose from my body and went tumbling down the slope into the mouth of the middle tunnel.

I crashed into Something that couldn’t scramble out of the way in time. Something that made a cry nothing earthly could make. I figured it might be scareder than me, so I let loose with a god-awful bloody‑murder scream. Turns out, the dead can scream damn effectively.

The living just can’t hear, which would probably be just fine with them if the choice were offered.

Immediately came the most repulsive stench I ever endured and whatever was in that tunnel took off like a bat out of hell while I maintained possession of the disputed territory. Though I controlled the ground, the Something still controlled the air. Only being dead made that stench bearable.

Meanwhile, the sheriff’s boys, hearing and smelling none of this, were stuffing my body into the bag. They did seem in a bit of a hurry and none too gentle about it. Something’d given them the willies. Least, they were looking over their shoulders from time to time ‑‑ ‘cept for our poker‑faced sheriff, of course, who never let on to being bothered by anything.

When they got the bag zipped and yelled for those above to start hoisting, I decided I might as well ride up with it, go into town, and see how everybody took my death.

Didn’t work that way. Every time I hopped on the bag, no matter how I tried to hang on, I slid right off like it was greased. It occurred to me maybe ghosts really do have to haunt wherever they died. As much as I liked the Sun Lizard, this would be an uninteresting way to spend eternity. The idea that ghosts might want to lure others to their own fate just to have someone around to be less lonely with now made perfect sense. Any company was likely better than being alone forever.

A lot of trying proved I couldn’t climb the walls of the shaft either. Same slippery problem.

Turns out, time passes with a special exquisite slowness when you’re dead. I finally worked up the courage to investigate the tunnels in hope one of the three now came out at some new opening I could slip through.

The first went back only a dozen feet to a few petrified supplies and broken tools. The second was the one Something had run off along when I screamed. I decided to skip that one. The third wound back and forth, following traces of silver that, like some heartless women he had known, were full of promises they had no intention of keeping. I counted three thousand one hundred and seventeen steps (that’s right, no ghostly floating, I was still stepping) before I came to the tunnel’s end in a pile of rubbish.

Just one tunnel left. I put off exploring that one.

I lost track of time. They’d put a new cover over the shaft so I couldn’t even tell night from day. For a while, whenever I felt like it, I dropped a small pebble onto a pile. When there were twenty pebbles, I decided I’d gone completely stir‑crazy. Time to explore the last tunnel no matter how that turned out.

It went back and down twenty one hundred and four paces before coming to a tee. The air in the left branch was stale. Nothing interesting that way. The right held a trace of a familiar, stomach-churning scent.

Now, I’d had time to think. Either nothing could hurt me and I’d be down here forever, or even ghosts weren’t immune to disaster. So depending what was down the tunnel, my stay in the Sun Lizard might not be all that long after all. One of those should have been a better fate than the other, but I was damned if I could tell which.

I headed down the right tunnel.

Something in the darkness retreated before me. My turn to stalk then. Satisfying.

And then I tripped over something, obviously a body. Some forgotten miner petrified by the dry mine heat, maybe? But this didn’t feel like any miner I’d ever met. Maybe due to all those extra legs and arms.

Unreal hairs stirred on my ghost arm.   Then an odd feeling flowed up my arm. When it flowed over my face, I swear my brain started itching. I was scared stiff. I mean I couldn’t move.

Now something was inside my head, weeping. I hadn’t let myself feel that kind of sadness in years. Not since Sue left. After that I’d just kept to myself.

“Bli,” I heard in my mind. It took no imagination to hear despair. “Bli. Bli. Bli!”

“Dead,” I thought, caught up in the same despair. “Dead. Dead. Dead!”

I’d been searched for, found, my body recovered. My ghost only got left behind because nobody suspected it existed and wouldn’t know what to do about it if they did.

I guessed the Something from the lights, from the stars, had gotten separated, lost, and died down deep in this mine. Whatever people Something belonged with were making their own sheriff’s search from the sky, but there was too much unfamiliar geography, too many hidden places to look, no idea he’d died underground. Maybe they didn’t even know about mines. And the local creatures – us — constantly getting in the way as the search became ever more urgent.

I could understand my companion’s despair. My body had been retrieved. How could his people ever find his?

The itching settled deeper into my mind. Suddenly, I had a vulture’s eye view of the land. The shadows were long. The sun would be setting any time now. The valley looked something odd, like seeing it through a different kind of eyes.

My companion shifted. The contact between us became near suffocating.

A desperate question hung in my mind which I understood as “Where? Where?” Over that air view of the whole plateau, something like a floating question mark swept back and forth.

I finally made enough sense of the view to recognize Broken Bridge, a natural arch geologists say collapsed around the time Indians first came to these canyons. From Broken Bridge toward Double Canyon, back into the right canyon fork. A small dark spot you’d hardly notice ‑‑ the pile of wood and rocks now covering the Sun Lizard. Here, I said.

I recognized a questioning. Here. Here?

Here! I wasn’t wrong. I’d wandered these hills all my life.

A shape I took to mean an “X” appeared where I’d located the shaft. I felt a sudden release of energy as this creature, this dead creature ‑‑ What? Projected his location to the searchers?

Alien ghosts talked to their living? Not just listened to them, like me?   Well, our ghosts sometimes had reason to speak to their living too. Returning his body probably seemed a pretty good reason to him. I hoped he’d get a big funeral. Once his people left with his body, we two companionable ghosts would have all the time in the world to get to know each other.

The image of the ground got larger as the searchers closed in over the shaft. A great flurry of conversation opened up between my dead companion and those above that left me exhausted. I got the idea I was serving as some kind of brain‑boost to help him be heard over that distance. That was fine by me.

The evening line of trucks loaded with curious towners was pulling off the north highway, gathering for the nightly show. Soon they’d spread out over the valley, each for some preferred viewing location. I wondered why nobody’d noticed all the activity in daylight. Some kind of camouflage, maybe? But at night, lights can’t be camouflaged and still be lights.

The air view changed to one from higher up. One craft hovered low over the mine shaft, the others gathered between the shaft and the spreading trucks. They flashed bright as lightning and raced off low to the ground toward the trucks, all the while performing impossible maneuvers and setting off flashes and booms like the world itself was splitting apart.

I was afraid for my friends — for what seemed about to happen.

No harm, I was assured. No interference. They were just making the trucks keep their distance.

The searchers hovered just above the mine. The cover moved out of the way all by itself. Dark shapes descended into the shaft.

It took only minutes before lights appeared in our tunnel. A half dozen creatures gathered around the body at my feet. “Bli.” I heard several times in a variety of tones.

One creature produced a container that was all light and shadow. The contents poured over the body and spread, enclosing him completely.

I figured they’d go away then, but they weren’t done quite yet. One set out tiny metal cones, forming a ring. The presence in my mind vanished abruptly. So, they retrieve not only the body, but the ghost or soul as well? I was left empty and intensely envious.

When the cones had been gathered up, they put out a second set. What in the world?