Navidson asks.

Dr. O'Geery mulls this over, takes another sip of his coffee, eyes the samples again, and then finally shrugs, "Not much really, though you've got yourself a nice range here."

"Nothing peculiar or out of the ordinary?" Navidson presses.

O'Geery shakes his head.

"Well except maybe the chronology."

"Meaning?" Reston eases his wheelchair forward.

"Your samples all fall into a very consistent scheme. Sample A is pretty young, a few thousand years old, while K is a few hundred thousand. Q over here is in the millions and these—" referring to MMMM through XXXX " — well, in the billions. Those last bits there are clearly meteoric."

"Meteors?" Navidson shoots a look at Reston.

O'Geery nods, picking up the sample marked WW. "In my opinion Rubidium-87/strontium-87 is the best dating method we have, yielding formation ages anywhere from 4.4 to 4.7 billion years old. If we place the age of the earth at around four and a half billion years old, it's pretty obvious these had to come from someplace other than here. I doubt lunar but maybe interplanetary. XXXX, your last sample, is by far the oldest and most interesting. A composite of younger material, 4.2 billion years old, combined with deuterium rich particles suggesting that possibly, now I want to stress possibly here, but this deuterium could indicate matter older than even our solar system. Interstellar perhaps. So there you have it—a very nice little vein of history."

Reston wheels back around to the table, as if Dr. O'Geery's explanation should now somehow cast the samples in a new light. Nothing about them, however, has changed. As Gillian Fedette exclaimed on August 4 ^th , 1996 at The Radon Conference in St. Paul, Minneapolis: "Not surprisingly, despite [O'Geery's] analysis, the samples continue to remain obdurate and lifeless."

" Where did you say you got all this from?" O'Geery asks." Antarctica?"

Primarily thanks to O'Geery's conclusions, some fanatics of The Navidson Record assert that the presence of extremely old chondrites definitively proves extra-terrestrial forces constructed the house. Others, however, claim the samples only support the idea that the house on Ash Tree Lane is a self-created portal into some other dimension. ³⁵¹ As Justin Krape dryly remarked: "Both arguments are probably best attributed to the persistent presence of schizophrenia plaguing the human race." ³⁵²

Keener intellects, however, now regard scientific conjecture concerning the house as just another dead end. It would seem the language of

³⁵ 'A Lexicon of Improbable Theories, Blair Keepling, ed. (San Francisco: Niflheim Press, 1996). In chapter 13, Keepling credits The Navidson Record with the revival of the Hollow Earth Movement. Tracing this implausible theory from the wobbly ratiocinations of John Cleaves Symmes (1779-1829) through Raymond Bernard's The Hollow Earth.The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History (1964) to Norma Cox's self-published pro-Nazi piece Kingdoms Within Earth (1985), Keepling reveals yet another bizarre subculture thriving in the Western world. Of course even if this planet were truly a hollow globe—an absolute impossibility—Tom's dropped quarter still describes a space far greater than the earth's radius (or even diameter).

³⁵² Justin Krape's Pale Micturitions (Charleston, West Virginia: Kanawha Press, 1996), p. 99.

objectivity can never adequately address the reality of that place on Ash Tree Lane.

Perhaps for us the most significant thing gleaned from this segment is Navidson's persistent use of all the data [158] to deny the internal shattering

them whisper about my night screams—"He's the one, I'm sure of it." "Shhhh, not so loud."

For some reason, I've been thinking more and more about my mother and the way her life failed her, humiliated her with impulses beyond her command, broke her with year after year of the same. I never knew her that well. I remember she had amazing hair, like sunlight, extremely fine and whisked with silver, beautiful even when it was uncombed, and her eyes always seemed to brim with a certain tenderness when I visited. And though most of the time she whispered, sometimes she spoke up and then her voice would sound sweet and full like chapel bells caroling in the foreign towns I'd eventually wander at dawn, echoing down those streets where I'd find myself in the spare light, rubbing my cold hands together, hopping around like a lunatic, waiting for the pastry shops to open so I could buy a piece of bread and a cup of hot chocolate.

She also used to write me these letters, always handwritten and full of strange colored words. They started after my father was killed, loaded with advice and encouragement and most of all faith. I don't know if I would have survived Raymond without them. But she was never that well, and eventually her words soured, until— Well, I wish I could just stick to thoughts of her hair and her brimming eyes and caroling bells in foreign towns at dawn.

It's never that simple though, is it?

One day I received a letter in which she apologized for what she'd done. At first I thought she was talking again about the pan of oil she'd accidentally knocked to the floor when I was four but that wasn't it at all, though in an awful way her confession did change the way I began to view my scars, their oceanic swirls now spelling out suspicion and much too much doubt for me to really address properly. Anyhow, she was referring to a completely different event when my father was finally forced to take her away to The Whale, when I was only seven, a day I cannot for the life of me remember.

As she explained it, her thoughts at that time had entirely deteriorated. The burden of life seemed too much for her to bear and therefore, in her mind, an impossible and even horrible burden to impose upon a child, especially her own. Based on these wild ratiocinations, she gathered me up in her arms and tried to choke me. It was probably a very brief attempt. Maybe even comic. My father intervened almost immediately, and my mother was then taken away for my own safety. I guess I do remember that part. Someone saying "my own safety." My father I imagine. I suppose I also remember him leading her away. At least the shape of him in the doorway. With her. All blurred and in silhouette.

Raymond knew a little about my mother's history and he used to say it was a bad dream that got her.

"Nightmares you know," he once told me with a grin. "Can mess you up permanently. I've seen it happen to buddies of mine. That's why you'll never catch me without a gun under my pillow. That'll get any man through the night."

A week ago I gave myself a Christmas present. I dug up my Visa, which I still try my best to avoid using, and not only picked up a second gun, this time a stainless steel Taurus 605 .357, but also went ahead and ordered a rifle. More specifically I ordered a Weatherby 300 magnum, along with twenty boxes of 180 grain core-locked rounds.

caused by Tom's death and Karen's flight. He only speculates with Reston about what it could mean that samples A thru XXXX form a timeline extending back before the birth of even the solar system. He uses his camera to embrace the Princeton laboratory equipment, seek out the appeasement of numbers, all the while never openly reflecting on the very real absence continuing to penetrate his life. Similar to the way Karen tried to rely on Feng Shui to mitigate the effects of the house, Navidson turns to the time telling tick of radioactive isotopes to deny the darkness eviscerating him from within.

Noda Vennard believes the key to this sequence does not exist in any of the test results or geological hypotheses but in the margin of a magazine which, as we can see for ourselves, Navidson idly fills with doodles while waiting for Dr. O'Geery to retrieve some additional documentation:

Mr. Navidson has drawn a bomb going off. An Atom bomb. An inverted thermonuclear explosion which reveals in the black contours of its clouds, the far- reaching shock-wave, and of course the great pluming head, the internal dimensions of his own sorrow. [159]

But even if that is indeed the best way to describe the shape of Navidson's emotional topology, it is still nothing compared to the vision the house ultimately prepares for him.

As professor Virgil Q. Tomlinson observes:

That place is so alien to the kingdom of the imagination let alone the eye—so perfectly unholy, hungry, and inviolable—it easily makes a fourth of July sparkler out of an A-bomb, and reduces the aliens of