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managed to dredge and divert and choke the Mississippi River to where it's
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both dammed and damned. And, as a result, the process has reversed itself:
every year more land is lost. The sea is returning to claim its ancient and
rightful territory. Louisiana loses the equivalent of two football fields to
the ocean every day.
Don't believe me? Look it up.
Still don't believe it? That's because the concept is unthinkable.
And that's why it continues. You can't motivate people to combat something
they can't wrap their minds around.
Let's face facts: it takes a certain amount of denial to live in a swamp,
below sea level, surrounded by vast amounts of water held back by flimsy walls
of earth and ancient cement.
Maybe I just have a better imagination. Or a clarity of perspective since I
live in the solid, northern end of the state. Whichever, I couldn't help
flinching when the inner door of the airlock opened. By all rights there
shouldn't have been anything on the other side but water and/or compressed
silt and muck.
Instead, there was a dry and spacious corridor.
Of stone!
For a fleeting moment I felt the first quiverings of a fresh, full-blown
panic.
Then I saw that the floor, walls, and ceiling were nothing like the
stone-flagged, earthen tunnels in the Faerie Mound. Here the construction was
tightly-fitted stone blocks of gigantic dimensions. The passageway itself
would have allowed four of us to walk abreast with plenty of room on both
sides. Instead, there were only two of us, fleshwise, and Mama Samm and I had
to follow our diminutive guide, feeling uncharacteristically tiny amid such
cyclopean architecture.
The floor beneath our feet felt pebbly and uneven and the nearest wall seemed
to contain some three-dimensional motif or decoration.
wall's surface.>
>Yo mama, Cséjthe?
If I'd had my own eyes I would have blinked.
>What kind of manners did yo mama teach you, boy?
Oh.
>Very well.
our right. >Just remember I ain't no taxicab and you ain't no high-tipping
fare.
The surface of each ten-by-fourteen-foot block was adorned like a prehistoric
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diorama of aquatic life. Trilobites, brachiopods, gastropods, bryozoans,
cephalopods, crinoids, tabulate and rugose corals, pelecypods, littered the
walls, the floor, and, presumably, the ceiling which was illuminated here and
there by another bare bulb on a naked string of wires every twelve feet or so.
Irena turned back and saw us touching the knobby protrusions of petrified
flora and fauna. "Oh," she said, "I see you've noticed one of our great
mysteries."
"Mmm-hmm," Mama Samm agreed. "Giant blocks of dressed stone dating back to
the dinosaurs . . ."
"Oh, much older than the dinosaurs. Most of these," Irena indicated the
scattering of ancient forms, "date from the Devonian and Mississippian Ages of
the Paleozoic Era between 380 and 420 million years ago."
"Well, honey, I may not know the exact numbers, but I do know my sequences."
"Sequences?" Irena echoed.
Mama Samm nodded. "I mean you got more than a bunch of pretty rocks stuck in
your old stone walls." She ran a large finger along one of the tight seams
where a calcified crinoid had lodged around four hundred thousand centuries
ago. "Seems these fossils showed up hereafter this stone was cut,after this
place was built. Which means whoever built it was really, really old. Older
than the dinosaurs! Certainly older than humans! Our ancestors didn't show up
until about six million years ago. And they didn't get around to doing
anything like this until like ten seconds ago in geological time. So, who
built this place?"
"The Krell," Irena answered.
* * *
Actually, she was pulling our leg. No one in the New Orleans demesne had a
clue but neither was anyone inclined to look a 400-million-year-old gift horse
in the mouth.
All that Irena knew was that Marie Laveau had led her "people" down into the
underspaces of the Orpheum back when it was first being built at the turn of
the last century. The Voices told her where to dig, and she enlisted the
bodies of dozens and eventually hundreds of thralls to excavate the miles of
prehistoric stone corridors and chambers choked with mud, ranging from packed
sediment all the way to fossilized strata. As the decades passed above, a
succession of airlocks were constructed, openings were sealed, collapsed rooms
and hallways walled off, and foot by foot, yard by yard, sections were cleared
and areas were made habitable.
The ancient underground city was not reclaimed by archeologists but by
monsters. Led by a monster who was hearing voices even back then. So the best
clues as to the identities of the ancient builders were excavated along with
the tons of mud, sand, silt, and petrified sediments, and dumped in ditches,
canals, trash heaps, the river wherever the equally disposable thralls could
dispose of hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of earthen debris one bucket at
a time without attracting undue notice. It took decades just to carve out
sufficient space for Marie and a staff and guest list approaching seventy. But
what was time to creatures that might be immortal. Especially in preparing the
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perfect shelter to retreat to when threatened? Laveau might be crazy but she
wasn't stupid.
Ones,> I mused.
>What? This was never a temple. And it wasn't builtby orfor any Great Old
Ones, Mister Chris. Don't you be talking or thinking no nonsense about which
you know nothing about!
>I said "Outer Gods" not "Elder Gods." The Elder Gods oppose the Outer Gods!
>Excuse me?
to the big ancient scary types that weren't their friends, one would assume >
>I never actually said that the architects of this place were the enemies of
the Great Old Ones.
>My tone look! This is part of an ancient complex built by the Elder Things!
contractors.>
>Elder Gods aredifferent than Elder Things! ElderThings were an alien race!
>And I told you we arenot going to discuss this. The Elder Things came here a
thousand million years ago! The Great Old Ones hated and feared them! The
Elder Things waged war against the Mi-go, the Great Race of Yith, and the Star
Spawn
scorecard, here.>
>They'regone , Mister Chris! Wiped out! Extinct. Between their wars without
and the rebellion of their dreaded shoggoths within, the last remnants escaped
to the stars eons before the first hominid climbed down from the trees!
talking about but because I got you to use the word "hominid." That, alone, is
worthy of silent contemplation . . . >
Plus we both needed to focus on the remainder of Irena's account. She was
telling us about rooms, still being excavated, where great murals adorned the
walls. Scenes of fantastic tableaus featuring an incredible array of creatures
unlike anything Irena had come across in her biology or zoology texts. Murals
which were defaced and destroyed at Marie Laveau's command. Presumably the
Voices told her to do so, and so these Voices presumably were no friends to
the original architects of this place.
Which continued to beg the question.
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Unfortunately someone was being a big ole party poop onthat subject.
The one thing Irena could tell us about these Voices is that they had spoken
to the Vampire Queen of New Orleans again, early this morning. Laveau had
staggered out just an hour or so before sunrise, muttering that she had to
obtain "The Russian Key" before it was gone.
"And for all I know, she's just ashes on the morning winds, now," the young
woman finished, visibly upset.
While my host and I were both of the opinion that this wouldn't necessarily
be such a bad thing, we both realized that Marie had saved the lives of this
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