Random Story :
The First Robert Stolz
Author: Vanessa Kittle Robert Stolz looked at the body on …
The Shady
Author: Majoki
It wasn’t long after I’d begun my USGS project near a little southern town that I began hearing threats and warnings about The Shady.
“Don’t be messing near The Shady after dark.”
“Behave or I’ll chase your sassy mouth out to The Shady.”
“You don’t know no real trouble ‘til you been to The Shady.”
It soon became clear to me that to the townsfolk The Shady was more a thing, than a place. Though it was definitely a place. I’d gone down there after hearing some of the talk.
About two miles off the only paved road west of town was a steep, wooded gulch that led to a dark, stagnant pond surrounded by tangled forest and vines. It was one dismal nitch, and I couldn’t see why anyone would want to willingly head down there.
But for some reason, I kept thinking about The Shady, and the local warnings about it, especially from parents to their children. When you work for the U.S. Geological Survey, you kind of always want to dig into things. And something about The Shady’s gulch and pond felt, well, a little shady to me, so I decided to dig a bit deeper into its surroundings.
Digging becomes a whole lot easier when you have access to LiDAR. I put in a request for one of our aerial survey teams to make a LiDAR pass over the area. It was well within my project parameters, so in about a week, I had the point cloud data on my laptop and began building a three-dimensional model of The Shady.
Let’s just say, it was highly anomalous. So, I sent a request for another LiDAR pass over the area to rule out a number of aberrant readings. In reality, I was crapping my pants over what the 3-D imaging had revealed beneath the pond, but you can’t tell that to your USGS colleagues.
Maybe I should have. Because during the second survey, the plane disappeared over The Shady. Vanished. All contact lost. No wreckage found. The three crew members gone.
I was gutted and felt guilty as hell. I’d heard the warnings since day one: “You don’t know no real trouble ‘til you been to The Shady.” And I knew that real trouble was coming. I don’t know how long The Shady had been there, but it was clear from my initial 3-D model of the gulch and pond that it wasn’t from around here.
A giant, hollow, metallic sphere was sitting underground there, and whatever was going on deep beneath that black pond was looking extra shady. Or, more precisely, extraterrestrial shady.