(This entry is part of a series. It begins here. Prove your parents wrong and do something right for once in your life! Start at the beginning.)
A photograph of a woman standing on the shore of a lake in the High Sierra. Across the lake, a smallish cluster of conifers; probably a good campsite in there. The slopes behind the trees are more rocky than not, with patches of snow lingering in the shade. The craggy mountain above has a small glacier clinging to it, symbiotic and dying. The stones will survive. Will they miss the glacier’s cold embrace? Will winter’s waning onslaught bring bittersweet memories, the brief weight of snow hearkening back to the days when a hobnailed Scotsman tramped through here with only tea and biscuits to sustain him as he climbed? The mountain itself is silent on this subject, jagged and sharp—like an ancient volcanic shark’s tooth. It is bathed in the early morning light of those mountains, at once hot and crisp and cool. Perfectly distinct. Yet its reflection in the lake below, while slightly wavy and therefore not a perfect mirror image, is more real. More solid. The colors are deeper.
The reflection looks like the truth.
The actual truth is so perfect it looks illusory. Like a painted backdrop.
Like scenery.
This is how my daily life feels, compared with that I have experienced in the last twenty-four hours.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Ghost Child Mary’s words that I’m going to unravel all the secrets. She only agreed to leave Weedbeard’s house when he promised to keep a closer eye on me. I half expected her to wake me up today. I haven’t seen her since she walked into the Montclair fog early this morning. Odd as her very existence is, she—and everything surrounding this production at Woodminster—feels more real than my coffee table.
I feed Maxwell, I get ready for my day, I study my lines. But the puzzles I’ve stumbled across are bubbles of intrigue that won’t stop popping in my mind. I put down my script, refill my coffee and write them down:
was my purpose
This first message was written in what looked like charcoal on the sidewalk outside the Old Firehouse.
Beware the fog. Beware the night. She is coming for you.
The second message, this was on a note beneath my check after brunch the same day I saw the first message.

get to leave
Third message, written on the curb right next to where I always park my car.

into the party
Fourth message, scrawled on the side of Woodminster itself, near the stage door. I only saw it because Joel Schlader took a picture with his phone before hosing the wall clean.
My hunch: the short messages are not part of the larger message. I could spend hours working on anagrams, but my last experience on that track tells me it’s a dead end. The three shorter phrases don’t work together. But they feel like they’re part of the same message.
I head out to meet a friend for coffee. The messages are in my mind the whole time. She notices that I’m distracted:

“I’ve never seen you this silent for this long outside of a theater,” she says.

“Am I more silent in a theater?” I say.

“Backstage. In the quiet zones. You’re silent as stone.”
I put everything out of my head, regaling her with stories of this and that. We part agreeing to meet for coffee again next week. It feels like I’m saying yes in a dream: speaking aloud and about to wake myself.
After a visit to my father’s Chiropractic office, I head to Woodminster. I feel like a secret suitor sneaking into his beloved’s back yard in broad daylight, just to be near her house. So, really, I feel like a stalker. I have no reason to be here this early, but bubbling in my head is the nagging hot springs of … what?
Backstage. In the quiet zones. You’re silent as stone.
This phrase from my coffee friend replays in my head as I stand outside my car, staring at the theater. It occurs to me I have no desire to go in there right now. I head up the path toward the box office. This is the same path Ghost Child Mary appeared on … last night? Or in 1996? Has she always been floating around here? I feel nothing on the path, I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with me. The nothingness feels strange. Not numb, just … padded.
Backstage.
Reaching the box office, I turn right and wander up the path from the box office toward the road. Head toward the ranger station? Nope. I’m feeling … left. I meander down the paved road, veering right when it forks. This feels familiar.
In the quiet zones.
Up a rise in the road, then curving down to the left, the grass so dry it’s not even golden. Life has been sucked from it by summer heat. Everything dry, brittle, jagged deadfall. Pine needles, dust, oppressive heat. This place feels scarred and scabbed. There are tall trees far down the road and I’ve a mind to head that way—
You’re silent as stone.
Then a question dings in my head: where the hell is the pyramid?
I stop, turning to my left.
There it is! Right there, in broad daylight!
This is what I was looking for on Tuesday. There was a note on my car: FIND THE PYRAMID.
All padded weirdness fades away. I run to the pyramid. It’s made of stone, sitting on a concrete base. Rough-hewn. There’s a crack in the side facing the road. I look inside with the help of my phone. Nothing.
I walk around the pyramid. It’s, what, eight feet tall? I think about climbing it.
Then I see, written in charcoal on the west side of the concrete base:
order settlements in
And the ‘l’ of settlements is also an arrow, pointing up. I look at the pyramid.
On the west side, a deliberate hole about ¾ of the way up. I think of the escape chute for the Pharaoh’s soul or whatever.
It can’t be that easy.
Stepping onto the platform, I look into the hole. There’s dirt and some broken glass. But there, in the back … I find a twig and drag out a Ziploc bag. It’s covered with dried muck. Doesn’t smell bad, just looks gross.
Camouflage?
It has paper inside. Holding the bag away from my face, I pull it open. No hordes of locusts, no reek. I peek inside.
Yellowed and faded with time, it’s a clipping from a newspaper:

July 10, 1952
Montclair, CA
No Progress in Missing Girls Case

Life snaps back into focus. I’m craving coffee. I need to pee. Not in that order. But I’m going to get somewhere safe and public before I read this thing. I feel too exposed here on the lonely, dry, tinder-box hillside.

As I’m skedaddling back up the road toward the theater, I feel eyes on me. Turning, I see a figure behind me on a rise to my left. They step back under the dead pine trees, into shadow.