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couldn’t be recorded. Now it can, so we concentrate on the types with obvious meaning. But music is a side alley. Even speech isn’t important. Every other species on the planet gets by with chirps and barks—how come we need thousands of words?”
    “Because our universe is more complex than a dog’s.”
    “But that’s because of speech, not the other way around. Our world is full of talking, radio, television, everybody chattering, so loud all the time that we forget why control of sound was originally important to us.”
    “Which was?”
    “Speech developed from prehistoric religious ritual, grew out of chanted sounds. The question is why we were doing this back then. Who we were trying to talk to.”
    The man had begun to smile faintly.
    “Also why, when you look at European Stone Age monuments, it’s clear that sound was a major design factor. New Grange. Carnac. Stonehenge itself—the outside faces of the uprights are rough, but the interiors are smooth. To channel sound. Certain frequencies of sound.”
    “Long time ago, Oz. Who knows what those guys were up to? Why should we care?”
    “Read the Syntagma Musicum, Praetorius’s ancient catalog of musical instruments. Back in the sixteenth century, all the major cathedral organs in Europe had thirty-two-foot organ pipes, monsters that produce infrasound, sounds too low for the human ear to even hear. Why—if not for some other effect these frequencies have? Why did people feel so different in church, so connected with something beyond? And why do so many alternative therapies now center on vibration, which is just another way of quantifying sound?”
    “Tell me,” Jones said quietly.
    “Because the walls-of-Jericho story is about sound breaking down not literal walls but figurative ones,” Oz said. “The walls between this place and another. Sound isn’t just about hearing. It’s about seeing things, too.”
    The man nodded slowly, and in acquiescence. “I hear you, my friend, if you’ll excuse the pun. I hear you loud and clear.”
    Oz sat back. “That enough?”
    “For now. We’re on the same page, that’s for sure. I’m curious. Where did you first hear about this?”
    “Met a guy at a conference a couple years ago. A small convention of the anomalous, down in Texas.”
    “WeirdCon?”
    “Right. We kept in touch. He had some ideas, started working on them in his spare time. He was building something. We e-mailed once in a while, I shared my research on prehistorical parallels with him. Then, nearly a month ago, he dropped off the face. Haven’t heard from him since.”
    “Probably he’s fine,” the man said. “People get spooked, lay low for a while. You two ever discuss this in a public forum?”

    “Hell no. Always private.”
    “You never e-mail anyone else about it yourself?”
    “Nope.”
    “Never know when ‘they’ might be listening, right?”
    This was both a joke and not a joke, and Oz grunted. Among people trying to find the truth, the concept of “them” was complicated. You knew “they” were out there, of course—it was the only way to make sense of all the unexplained things in the world—but you understood that talking about “them” made you sound like a kook. So you put air quotes around it. Someone said THEM with double underlining and a big, bold typeface, and you knew he was either faking it or a nut. You heard those little ironical quote marks, however…chances were the guy was okay.
    “Isn’t that the truth,” Oz said, playing along. “You just never know. Even if ‘they’ don’t actually exist.”
    The man smiled. “I’m going to talk to my friends, see about getting us all together. Glad we met, Oz. Been waiting a long time to connect with someone like you.”
    “Me, too,” Oz said, for a moment feeling very alone.
    “We’ll hook up soon. Take care of yourself in the meantime,” Jones said, and left.
     
    Oz watched the man get back into his car, drive out of the lot, and take