“Try to open this door,” Silverhhand said as I walked up. Around the corner, just as Blue Moon indicated.
I went up to the keypad, noticed the thing was laid out like that of a traditional phone, 3 or 4 letters grouped under each number. This:
2 corresponds to A, B, C
3 corresponds to D, E, F
4 corresponds to G, H, I
5 corresponds to J, K, L
6 corresponds to M, N, O
7 corresponds to P, Q, R, S
8 corresponds to T, U, V
9 corresponds to W, X, Y, Z
“Jesus. We’re almost at the end. Hurry up with it, will you.”
And so I took Jonny literally and carefully typed in 53787, the numbers standing for the letters in the name he just gave me. JESUS. No go. Then I thought of the WOW signal that had replaced JESUS in Grand Theft Auto’s version of Richard Knight’s Salvation Mountain over in the southwest part of the state, and, suspiciously, containing some of the same letters. What was it? I thought. Yes, 6E, um Q, J, and, er, 5. U somewhere in there too. Right, 6EQUJ5, I put them together in my head. That sounded right. So I figured out the corresponding numbers for the included letters and then typed 637855, so close to the other number. The door opened after I punched in 8, so only 4 needed. Even closer, then: 6378 to 5378. Only 1 after if we count in 1000s. I walked inside.
Silverhhand manifested on a lighted table in the revealed room full of high tech equipment. “Well what do we have here?” He was staring at a huge projection screen on the far wall, maybe a TV. He picked up a conveniently placed guitar, started strumming a tune he said was called “Beast of Tousaint”. “Ring any kind of bell?” he asked after playing a couple of bars. “Say… a mountaintop?” Suddenly images began to form on the screen across from us, layered one after another in a kind of domino effect. All this confused me at first. The people in the images appeared… different than the ones in Nightsity. They seemed alien to me. Then I recognized one about 5 in, which caused a domino effect itself. From there until the end of the “presentation” about 30 slides later many if not most seemed familiar. I had indeed seen them before. On a mountaintop. In Tousaint. I told this to Jonny who had finished his song by then.
“Good boy. Good, We’re ready to go out to the Oil Fields.” And his 97 silver 911 Porsche manifested before the screen representing a quick way out there. Would take hours to walk.
Sunklands 