The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [140]
"Strange, weren't they?" she asked.
"Serious people," said Kanazuchi.
"Seriously happy."
"No," he said, shaking his head slightly. "Not happy."
From the checkpoint forward, the road improved dramatically; hard packed dirt graded and leveled on top of the sand, nearly eliminating the rocking of the wagons. Across the dry flatlands to the rear, a distant rhythmic pounding faintly reached their ears. Eileen shielded her eyes and peered out in that direction but could see nothing on the heat-distorted horizon.
"What is that?"
"They are putting up fences," said Kanazuchi. "Barbed wire."
"Who is?"
"The people in white."
"You can see that from here?"
He didn't respond; Kanazuchi discarded Jacob's round hat, removed the long black coat, and began to strip off the motley patchwork beard.
They were getting close.
Time to reassume his own identity.
By nine o'clock that morning, the Chicago Western Union office had received a flurry of responses to their late-night barrage of telegrams. Attaching the name Arthur Conan Doyle to the inquiries greatly increased the alacrity and density of detail in the returns, particularly from newspaper editors, most of whom confessed they couldn't help with the requested information but were unable to resist firing off a question or two about the uncertain fictional fate of you-know-who.
As they had suspected, the most promising results came back in a lengthy reply from the Arizona Republican in Phoenix, the Arizona Territory's first newspaper.
The editor wrote that local attention was growing in the direction of a recently found religious settlement a hundred miles to the northwest. Called itself The New City, built on private property; its founders had bought over fifty square miles of surrounding undeveloped land. Clearly they had a lot of money to throw around; speculation about The New City's wealth centered on the possible striking of some fabulous silver lode.
Every one of the paper's repeated attempts to research a story on the place had been politely but firmly rebuffed; folks wanted to hang on to their privacy out there for some reason. That attitude didn't raise a sea of red flags in this sparsely populated corner of the world; a lot of people came west in search of that same commodity.
One of the reporters the Republican sent out that way had found the The New City so much to his liking he decided to stay on. They hadn't heard a single word from the man after a telegram announced his resignation—in which he described the place only as a "kind of Utopia"—but that didn't surprise folks at the paper much: He was a bachelor fellow from Indiana, an odd duck who'd never quite fit in.
Neither were Utopian social experiments that great a rarity in the development of the American character, noted Doyle. Over a hundred had sprung up all over the country since the Civil War, the most noteworthy being the Oneida Community of Perfectionists in upstate New York; known for the fine silverware they produced but even more for their bold rejection of marital monogamy. At the opposite end of the sexual spectrum were Mother Ann Lee's Shakers of the Millennial Church, strict celibate abstainers who had set up shop in more than thirty different locations from Massachusetts to Ohio. How they planned to perpetuate themselves without benefit of biological reproduction didn't seem to worry them since Mother Lee had prophesied the end of civilization within their lifetimes; chastity ensured them that theirs would be the only souls allowed through the Gates of Heaven. Why the Shakers then devoted themselves to building such sturdy, built-to-last crafts and furniture when there wouldn't be anyone left to appreciate them was a question they never got around