The Mummies of Blogspace9

Prologue
Leon Samples
Michelle Cavalcante
Bruce Wheeler
Cyrus Sanderson
Hacienda Segovia
Kim Castillo
Archive of the Indies
Vasco Cuellar
Radu
Rafael Duran
Pyramid at Segovia
Melchor Negromonte
Imp
Sopay
Naya
Blogspace9
Flamenco Melchor
Simón Bolivar
Alcazar of Seville
Gaspar Quiroga
Sebastiano Gota

July 3, 2011
Cupertino, CA
Administrator
http://www.admin.blogspace9.ex

note
: sequence interrupted -
this communication was posted 23 days after project initiation

Urgent communication to Dr. Bruce Wheeler: although your GPS software has been disabled in your attempt to avoid incarceration, please recall that you did just identify your location on a public blog.

In our ongoing effort to ensure the success of this project, and our concern for project personnel, we are herein notifying you that we have intercepted three communications from Seville to Rota that mention you and/or the killing of you.

The first call was made six minutes ago from a coded line in the Seville police department to the mobile phone of Tio Regalado, the gypsy patriarch of a Rota-based heroin distribution organization. Your death, and the contents of the house on Soledad Street for half a million euros, was the offer.

The second call, after Tio Regalado ran the offer by his captains, was from Melchor Negromonte, the gypsy patriarch of the Triana Gitano Capitano, a Seville-based criminal enterprise. Negromonte ordered Regalado to refuse the offer and provide you with security and safe haven.

The third call, which is only now just concluding, was direct from a landline in the old harem in the Seville Alcazar to Angelino Logoreci, an Albanian capo who controls most of the gun running in southern Spain, and who owns a beach house in Rota. Your death, and the contents of the house on Soledad Street for a million euros, was the offer. Contract accepted.

While estimates of Logoreci’s manpower and capacity for rapid asset mobilization are still being processed, you should anticipate hostiles on scene within seven to ten minutes.

July 29, 2012
Segovia, Peru
Leon Samples
http://www.greatbigLeon.blogspace9.ex

note
: sequence interrupted -
this communication was posted 414 days after project initiation

That last entry, July 3, 2011 - that was a watershed moment for me. That’s when I realized it had all gone to hell, and us with it. Sure, we pulled it together in the end. But we paid a high price.

The time period described in this blog spans barely seven weeks, but they were the densest weeks of my life. Had I known at the onset that seven weeks later most of my friends would be dead, I would have left Peru in a heartbeat. But of course I didn’t know that.

None of us knew what was at stake. And that’s the thing about archaeology - you never know what’s going to turn up once you start digging into an ancient pyramid. Maybe some burials, mummies even. But surely not a five-hundred-year-old secret worth killing for.

Seriously, if you told me 414 days ago that a demonically-possessed Spanish Grand Inquisitor had sponsored an archaeological excavation to find a horde of stolen Inca gold, I would have bought you a drink and shared a laugh.

If you then told me that a pair of undead conquistador knights would ultimately help us find an ancient book containing the secret to putting down walking mummies, I would have punched you in the face and had another drink. But I wouldn’t be laughing anymore.

And if you finished up by telling me that something was watching from inside that pyramid, some malevolent force that could animate the dead, I’d probably punch you again, or maybe have a third drink. I don’t know what I would do. We’ve never had that conversation.

But it’s all true, as you’ll come to realize. I’ve left the storyline alone, so you can read the actual posts, day by day, as it all unfolded, spitting us out into a reality nobody expected. I have plenty of time on my hands, so I’ve taken the liberty of cobbling together a timeline, and providing some background information on the members of our team.

It all ends badly, by the way. I understand now that I’ll never leave this pyramid, and I understand why. My name is Leon Samples. I am twenty-eight years old, and I am damned.

June 10, 2011
Segovia, Peru
Michelle Cavalcante
http://www.diggirl.
Blogspace9
.ex

voice activation mode:
enabled

indiv 1:
Guys, let’s do this, please, while the generators are running. According to the conditions of our contract, we should have been recording since day one, and we’re already four months into excavations. Leon, can you put the guinea pig down? That’s food, not a pet. And if you could stop staring at Kim for maybe two seconds, we could get this done.

indiv 2:
I happen to like this guinea pig, and I’m not staring at anyone. I’m a victim of the design of my human eyes. They respond to stimulus; it’s nothing more than rods and cones at work. When something tasty crosses my path, my optic nerves respond, pure and simple. But when something as smoking hot as Kim Castillo crosses the room, I’ll be honest, it’s mostly just the rods.

indiv 1:
Fine, but our funding is conditional on maintaining, and I shall read you the requirement here - a regular, updated, engaging, and public blog of our activities. So we’ll begin by introducing ourselves. I’m going to start typing now, and then we’re each going to have a turn.

indiv 2:
It looks like it started without you, Michelle. Life is like that sometimes. All you can do is jump in.

indiv 1:
Shut up, Leon. OK, somehow the voice recognition thing is on. And with you already slurring your words, this isn’t going well.

voice activation mode:
disabled

Greetings, blogosphere! As we archaeologists are fond of saying, context is everything, so here’s some: My name is Michelle Cavalcante. I am an archaeologist. I have the great fortune of working as field director for the greatest archaeologist in the world, Professor Cyrus Sanderson, who is currently asleep on the sofa.

I’m writing from the north coast. That’s Peru to those of you who desire a more complete geographical reference, but to those in the know, it’s just the north coast. We’re five hours north of Lima on bad roads, but it could be the end of the earth or another planet for all of the traffic we get. We’re living in a nice house, in a not-so-nice impoverished land-reform town, at the edge of a coastal desert.

Drive about an hour through the cane fields and you’ll reach the Panamerican highway. There’s a town there, where you can buy just about anything you want, as long as you only want cigarettes, beer, rice, chickens, rum, or pirated CDs. So in a nutshell, we’re extremely isolated, and we have absolutely everything we need to run an effective archaeological project.

In truth, we would have gotten this blog started sooner except for the fact that our generator has been so seriously on the blink that we barely have refrigeration. But other than that, things are rocking along.

We are four months into the excavation of a colonial hamlet established here by Spanish priests in 1578. It’s not much more than a tiny church, about two dozen houses, and some enclosures for animals. But what’s really interesting about this little hamlet is that the priests built it right in front of an ancient mud-brick pyramid.

And this, my friends, is one strange pyramid. It’s about thirty meters high and it looks like a drippy sandcastle, something Antoni Gaudi built on a bad day, in the rain, while detoxing. It’s an old pyramid. It was old when the Incas came here in about 1500, and it was even older when the priests came seventy-eight years later. Leon thinks it’s haunted, but he’s not very bright.