The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant Read Online Free PDF Page A

case. All of this plus what I have already come to learn tells me it is time now to pluck the evil flower in hopes that it will begin to whither before it overtakes me. I present it to you as objectively as possible, and leave it to your own discernment to reach a conclusion as to its importance.
    Tooms Canyon is a God-sized thumb gouge in the earth a hundred miles east of the Rockies and twenty-five miles north of the historic Horace/Griffin line. The declivity is steep and treacherous. Nothing grows therein—not a weed. In the midday sun the red rock and powder become like the walls of a furnace, and the rippling of the atmosphere caused by the rising heat has been known to conjure visions of paradise almost too intricate to be a mirage.
    In the western wall at the southern entrance to the canyon lie the radioactive sulfur springs which, year after year, draw the weak, the lame, and the terminally ill. Although some well-documented, remarkable cures have taken place at the springs since their healing powers were first discovered in 1860 by Elijah Tooms (visionary and animal-carcass sculptor) the poor accommodations, the harsh sun, have made it one of the best kept secrets among miraculous environments.
    When Tooms died in 1930, at the age of ninety, he had just completed a three-hundred-yard boardwalk that ran from the old stage trail to the cave in order to accommodate patients who would find walking in the deep red sand too exhausting. Although its handrails are splintered and some of its planks staved in or missing, it is still very much in existence. It had been patched once in 1945 when the area was made part of a federal preserve and then later in 1968 after the area lost its protected land status and was occupied by a commune of draft-dodgers, ex-prostitutes, and college dropouts from Southern California.
    In his day, Tooms frequently took out ads in the newspapers back East and in California to herald the amazing properties of the springs and to announce that the use of them was free, but only five known individuals visited the site in the time that he was its self-proclaimed proprietor. His diary attests to the full recovery of each of the patients. In fact, he, himself, bathed in the springs regularly and attributed his lifelong vigor to this daily ritual.
    To this day, standing sentry within the cave of the glowing, yellow-green waters, are those sculptures that Tooms created from the remains of animals he had either discovered dead in the canyon or had shot, himself. The idea of making them came to him after he ingested a certain red-capped mushroom that appears along the upper rim of the canyon following a heavy rain. He was gazing at the sun-bleached skeleton of an armadillo when he envisioned it rising up into a two-legged stance. Instead of its own insignificant head, he saw the skull of a coyote balanced on its negligible neck. Its paws were now bird talons dried like beef jerky by the sun. It said, “Build me” to him, in the voice of the woman who had broken his heart and sent him West in search of his fortune.
    Because so many of the cures have, in recent years, been verified and confirmed by scientific research, the religious community came to believe that there must be some part of God swirling in those strange pools. In 1970, Hawaiian pearl divers were hired by the Vatican to explore the depths of the Tooms Canyon Curative Springs. Hundreds of feet deep, at the phosphorescent heart of the magic, they found a book half-buried in the snowdrift sand. When it was brought to the surface, the experts discovered that even the ink had been completely preserved by the inherent chemistry of the waters. It was clear that they had resurrected Elijah Tooms’s own diary.
    Hardly anyone noticed the story, a mere 150 words, which appeared in the Horace/Griffin Examiner of January 1, 1971. It was reported that in an unusual show of generosity, the Vatican bequeathed the diary outright to J. T.