Chapter Forty Two:     Exoneration


FELIX SINSLEY responds to Ma-ralla's story --

Adam got back from his latest trip to Squatchland the other day and he had an interesting story told to him by an old shaman squatch-lady who used to work with the Number One Bastard who has stirred up most of the worst shit going on in the whole squatch world. The guy they call Da-starda-hat, one of the Nine Elders of Shamballah, who has been gradually murdering the other eight Elders over in the Himalayas, that same troublemaker who three of our heroic friends are going after even now.

According to the shaman-squatch-lady, 20 years ago this Da-starda-hat guy had put a spell on some human kid, hypnotizing him to kill Adam. The attack went wrong; Adam's mother got killed instead. It sure sounds like that human kid, later to become a hunter, is supposed to be ME, Felix Sinsley.

Anyway, Adam let me know that he thinks I'm not actually responsible for having killed his mother

. That would mean a lot to me. Of course I'd be overjoyed to be exonerated for the deliberate shooting of Mayala, but also pretty pissed off about what has been done to both Adam and myself. And poor Mayala, for Chrissake.

But I also got really confused, not quite certain that the story can be referring to ME because I'd never seen a Bigfoot before that fateful day in the Mother's Meadow, nor ever once when I was a boy. And I for sure had no memory of ever having been abducted and held captive for a whole month. You'd think I would have noticed that sort of thing.

I've been let in on a lot of secret squatch stuff since I got invited to that first kha-rat last year, so I know what a syssk is and have heard plenty about Da-starda-hat so I understood all of that just fine, but just couldn't see how that story could be true when I couldn't remember any of it. Regretfully: man, would I love to be exonerated for having shot Adam's Nokhon mother.

But Adam said I probably can't remember the incident because I'd been hypnotized not to, stressing that Dastardat has always been especially talented at what they call "psychic domination". That made sense, I mean, I've seen the Manchurian Candidate movies (both versions) about a sleeper spy who doesn't even know that he's a hit-man until he hears a trigger-phrase, so the idea wasn't new to me. So I thought about it for a few days, hoping there was some way it could be true. There was a vaguely familiar something nagging me but I couldn't define it.

Finally I called my father in Tacoma. He's over 80 now but still remembers things pretty good, so I asked him if I'd ever gone missing when I was a kid.

"Hell, yes, you still can't remember that?" he said and went on to tell me how I'd gotten lost in the Cascades while on a hunting and camping trip with him and my uncle Bud. I'd been 10 years old at the time and they'd been worried sick, thought I was dead. Search parties looked for me for a week, then had to give up. About a month later I just turned up at a gas station at Snoqualmie Pass, with no memory of how I got lost or where I'd been all month.

Not only could I not remember any of that ever happening, but even after my old pop told me about it I kept on forgetting what he said a few minutes later. It was like a Bermuda Triangle memory. Over the years my pop and uncle would ask about it every now and then, just to see if any memory had ever shown up, but I would always say: "Lost? I've never been lost... have I?"

But hearing about that from Adam affected me, made me wonder. I pondered over all the stuff I DID remember about that camping trip in the Snoqualmie National Forest and most of it was crystal clear in my head:

We lived in Tacoma back then, so it seemed like a big expedition to a far-away land, I was excited and happy to be there, away from everyday life in the big city. No yuckie girls, just us Men: my Pop, my uncle Bud and me; three macho dudes. We set up a tent beside a clean little creek, the rain forest looked like a jungle to me, I was a ten year-old Bwana.

We were there to hunt some deer and there seemed to be lots of them. After a couple of days of safety-first rifle instruction, it was finally my turn at last to be the assigned shooter. Pop and Bud ran through the woods about half a mile off, trying to chase a whole herd of deer my way. I was supposed to hide beside the trail and wait, then shoot just one deer and make sure of the kill. It was important to not let a wounded animal run off to die somewhere else. I remember feeling very responsible. So I waited, ready but safety still on, not wanting to shoot anybody except a deer. I was equipped with my dad's old US Army issued M-1 rifle with a clip of 12 bullets, so I was king of the world. Do not fuck with Felix Sinsley, he's armed and dangerous. All that stuff I remember clearly.

And that bunch of deer coming right at me, that's still vivid: me getting in a pretty good shot and seeing that deer stumble and fall..

Then things get really vague. I might have noticed the shadow of someone behind me, maybe registered a big silvery hairy hand briefly flashing past my eyes, although I could just be imagining those memories because of the story Adam told me, filling in the blanks.

Because after that it’s all a blank. Something happened, but I don't know what. I went missing, just gone, no trail to follow. Dad and Bud say they both heard that one shot and found a dead deer, but they didn't find me. They looked all day and all night before calling the police.

Oh yes, and just to make it all even more dramatic, while I was missing the local newspapers were headlining a series of Bigfoot sightings, also in the Cascades. Fairly consistent sightings of a female Sasquatch with silver-colored fur, extra big, maybe 9 feet tall. She'd been sighted at least 3-4 times over the past year. But no one connected that and my disappearance at the time.

Anyway, the very next thing I can remember is wandering out of the woods by the I-90 Freeway, confused and hungry, but physically okay. I was thinner but not emaciated, scratched up from pushing through the brush, but not seriously wounded. Only thing wrong with me was that I couldn't remember how I got there. But I remembered who I was and where I lived all right. Selective amnesia, they called it: a month's memories were just plain missing.

Everyone else was wondering where I'd been all that time, but I kept forgetting to think about it, like it didn't really concern me. Whenever reminded I made a joke of it. Alien abduction? Sex traffickers? And there was that local Bigfoot scare right about then, near the same woods I had disappeared from-- the most logical answer: Bigfoot took me. But I only laughed because I didn't believe in Bigfoot back then. Nobody did, not really.

And now Adam is saying that it was Da-starda-hat who had abducted me 40 years ago, then "infected" me with some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion that somehow caused me to shoot Adam's mother 20 years later? Hard to believe, but...

But recently I've been having nightmares about being just a kid kept in a dark place and tortured by two big hairy... things, which my adult self recognizes as Sasquatches, a male and a female. It's horrible, I panic and then the nightmare always becomes that moment on the meadow just before I shoot Adam's mother. Me screaming "don't do it!" to myself, but being unable to stop. History repeats itself; BOOM and I wake up.

But why did I shoot the mother if I was hypnotized to take out little Adam, that is, the Negotiator? Doesn't make sense.

Don't forget that I had a talk with Mayala, or her spirit --whatever-- during that first kha-rat I experienced, so I feel that I know her. Maybe that was all just smoke and mirrors, but it sure felt real at the time, even though I can't tell you what language we were speaking to each other. She forgave me, said it wasn't really my fault, although I couldn't really accept that. Maybe now I can, if this story is true.

Adam also reminded me about that time he'd gone crazy and attacked our house and scared the shit out me and my whole family. That had also been one of Da-starda-hat's syssk-spells, commanding Adam to... kill me? Or just scare me? That had confused us all-- why me? How could some evil Yeti witch doctor all the way over in the Himalayas even know who I am and why should he specifically target me? Why should he want some random American guy killed?

But now it seems that I wasn't random at all: he'd met me 40 years ago and put the same kind of spell on me. Did he want to punish me for shooting the wrong Sasquatch and failing my mission? Or did he really just want to get Adam imprisoned for murder here in Washington State and I was the only human Dastardat could identify to be a victim?

Actually, a lot of stuff seems to be falling into place: why was I such a violent teen-ager? I never got into crime but I sure did get into fights. I joined the Army as soon as I could because I WANTED to get into a war. And I was good at war, good with weapons, dedicated to the mission, an obedient soldier, maybe slightly obsessed with the skills of killing. I was literally fearless in battle-- I'm not bragging, not at all-- now I think I was accursed. Possessed.

Was I subconsciously attuning myself to fulfill Da-starda-hat's mission someday? That's one of the only things that make sense. And I kept on getting more hard-core: Airborne Ranger, Iraq, Afghanistan, South America, covert operations, I mean, shit... as Art once noted, I was Rambo.

It was Sarah who saved me from all that. Falling in love with the General's daughter, getting her pregnant and getting myself into the bad graces with the brass, having a kid. I just couldn't maintain the phony patriotism that had been driving me -- or whatever. I lost interest in killing anyone when I could love someone instead.

And yet, one day 20 years ago I just had to take up my rifle and go hunting for... something. I took a few days off my job at Burlington Northern Railways and went up into the Cascade Mountains, sort of wandering aimlessly. I saw some deer, but couldn't bring myself to shooting any of them. Guess I wanted something else.

I wandered around for three days, not knowing what I was doing. Not camping, I slept in my car and ate fast food when I could find it, thinking: what am I doing? This is stupid, why don't I just go home? But I couldn't, there was something I had to do, just didn't know what.

You know where this ends up: in the Mother's Meadow, minutes before it was ever called that. I'd parked my car way up by Gold Bar and had walked most of a day, wandering but evidently not aimlessly. It's just that somebody else was doing the aiming, certainly not me.

I saw her-- Mayala --on the other side of the meadow. A Bigfoot! I'd never believed in them, and still didn't, thinking I must have stumbled on somebody pulling a hoax, making phony footprints or a video. Then I saw a man up in a tree, Art, of course, so I figured he's shooting the video.

It wasn't until I saw the little kid Bigfoot that I felt an urge to shoot at anyone. I'd forgotten my rifle, even though I'd been carrying it at the ready for the last three days. Then... wait a minute...

Flashing back to that moment 20 years ago, I'm pretty sure that the sight of little Adam triggered the posthypnotic command, but it also gave me a glimpse of my 10 year-old self being abused by two big hairy monsters. I think I went into panic when I saw Mayala, at that distance probably resembling the female Sasquatch who torments me in my nightmares.

Maybe I was commanded to shoot the little Bigfoot but subconsciously needed to put down the much bigger she-squatch first because I considered her much more dangerous to me personally. And then, thank God, Arthur Forest stopped me before I could carry out the actual mission of killing the kid, otherwise I probably would have. Who knows? Not me.







Chapter 43

Adam Into Babylon