The Last Ancient
Author: Eliot Baker
Publisher: Burst Books, imprint of Champagne
Books
Pages: 316
Genre: Supernatural Thriller, Historical Mystery
Format: Paperback/Kindle
Book Summary:
Around Nantucket
Island, brutal crime
scenes are peppered with ancient coins, found by the one man who can unlock
their meaning. But what do the coins have to do with the crimes? Or the sudden
disease epidemic? Even the creature? And who--or what--left them?
The answer leads reporter Simon Stephenson on a journey through
ancient mythology, numismatics, and the occult. Not to mention his own past,
which turns out to be even darker than he'd realized; his murdered father was a
feared arms dealer, after all. Along the way, Simon battles panic attacks and a
host of nasty characters -- some natural, others less so -- while his heiress
fiancee goes bridezilla, and a gorgeous rival TV reporter conceals her own
intentions.
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Excerpt from The Last Ancient
The deer’s blood
catches the golden hour light. It radiates throughout the animal’s carcass in
fall hues that reflect the island’s rustling red leaves and honey-colored
needles littering the sand. Such eerie, blasphemous beauty. I fire shots from
my Nikon.
“That’s six. Six deer mutilations this month,” I say to my
experts. Click. Click. Click.
Branches partially cover the deer. Its eyes are wet brown
marbles rimmed and veined in burning red, as though it had been hung upside
down for a day. Its lips are peeled back above the gums in a grimace of broken
teeth. Brain matter spills through a crack in the skull. Two yellowjackets buzz
over the red pulp. Land. Feed. Hover above their feast. Click. The neck
is attached to the body by a flap of hide. One of the deer’s forelegs is
missing. Inside the hole in its torso I can see that its entrails have been
removed. I get on my elbows and snap pictures from the cold, damp sand. The
heart is gone, too.
Dr. Pauline Driscoll, Nantucket’s town biologist, is
squatting beside the carcass. She’s furious at Sgt. Brad Fernandez, who is
cursing and stomp-cleaning a gore-splattered boot into the sand. She affects
his tar-thick Roxbury accent. “Nice shaht cut, ace!” Her silvering French braid
swings out the back of her UMass baseball hat as she unpacks measuring tape,
sample tubes, and baggies from her turquoise external frame pack. Sgt. Fernadez
kicks bloody goo into the bushes.
“Maybe I wanna carry da machete fuh once, Doctor
Driscoll,” he says.
Dr. Driscoll mutters and scribbles into her notepad. She is
oblivious to her windswept beauty. Her dark eyes shine and sparkle, and she’s
maintained her triathlete’s figure despite being on the other side of forty.
She’s over a decade older than me, but I understand why Sgt. Fernandez wants to
impress her.
Dr. Driscoll carves out an eyeball, coaxing it from the
deer’s eye socket with a gloved hand. Tendons follow the jelly marble from the
orbital cavity like melted provolone. She saws through the tendons with a
retractable scalpel. Fernandez gags. It makes him look like a blushing Boy
Scout in his green Environmental Police uniform and billed hat and bulky black
utility belt. Driscoll smiles school-girl sweet, dropping the eyeball into a
baggie. She offers Fernandez the instrument and baggie, asking him if he’d like
to carry the scalpel for once.
Fernandez
holds up one hand at her and balls the other over his mouth, gulps twice.
“You’re one sick hippy,” he says.
Driscoll
hums a macabre rendition of Melanie Safka’s Lay Down as she scoops bits
of brain from the crack in the animal’s skull.
I sniff the shrieking wind. It’s bowing the barrens of
pitch pines toward our clearing in the scrub oak like gnarled magnetic
filaments. I can smell the ocean, almost hear it, but not see it. From our
elevated bald spot in the suffocating brush, I can see the sandy path we just
traversed. It cuts like a surgical scar through the open conservation land’s
tufts of bladed grass and bristling patches of black huckleberry and pasture
rose. It winds up Altar Rock into the reddening horizon, where a hunter stands
silhouetted on the rim of the valley, binoculars pressed to his face. The
strapped shotgun jutting from his shoulder makes him look like a fierce insect
with an antenna.
“You poor baby,” says Driscoll, passing a black
fine-toothed comb over the deer’s patchy fur. She taps the comb and a dozen
ticks fall like grains of volcanic sand into a plastic dish. “Those teeth, that
pelt--man, you were one sick fella.”
Fernandez breathes, gets down on one knee, and starts
shaving samples from the spine with his own folding knife. He then slices off
chunks of muscle and organs that he places into baggies under Driscoll’s
direction. Click.
“I’m bustin’ heads, and you can quote me on that,” says
Fernandez through clenched teeth behind his trimmed mustache. “Someone was
huntin’ before dawn.”
“Or something,” I say, snapping close-ups of the
spray radius. Drops of blood shine like rubies on wooden pendants in the
foreground against a hazy cloud of thorns. The experts exchange looks and
groans.
“Anyways, this is roundabouts where da Pike brothers said
dey heard something freaky ’bout an hour ago,” says Fernandez. “Said it was
like a deer cry, but kinda mutant, with loads a struggle.”
Dr. Driscoll stands and examines the sand and rocks for
tracks. She picks up the machete she used to carve a trail here through the
scrub oak. “Man, what is wrong with people?” she says and hacks at the
thorny curtain with skills she picked up surveying birds in the Amazon and in
Africa. She asks Fernandez if he can find any boot prints. He shakes his head.
I ask them to speculate on a predator. No dice.
“How about speculating on how it got in here then?” I say.
“We lost the tracks and the blood trail way long ago.”
“Good point,” admits Dr. Driscoll.
The deer’s remaining foreleg suddenly stiffens as though
saluting, hitting Driscoll’s thigh.
“Oh, fuck me hard on Sunday!” says Dr. Driscoll, jumping
into Sgt. Fernandez’s arms.
He
whispers, “Relax, it’s a fresh kill. And sure, Sunday’s good for me.”
Driscoll
shoves Fernandez, and says to me, “Don’t you dare put that in the article.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say, and try to smile. Can’t. I’m
shaken.
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About the Author
Eliot Baker lives in Finland. He teaches communications
at a local college and runs an editing and translating business, but would be
content singing for his heavy metal band and writing novels full-time. He grew
up near Seattle,
got his B.A. in World Literature at Pitzer
College, and got his M.S.
in Science Journalism from Boston
University. He was an
award-winning journalist at the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, and before that
he wrote for the Harvard Health Letters. He spent four years pursuing a career
in the sciences while at the Harvard
Extension School,
during which time he spun old people in NASA-designed rocket chairs and kept
younger people awake for 86 hours at a time in a sleep deprivation study. He
likes good books, all music, and bad movies, and believes music and literature
snobs just need a hug.
His
latest book is the supernatural thriller/historical mystery, The
Last Ancient.
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