This is the start of a new story, told in six songs and six sets of graphic-novel panels. It’s called A Light Away From Home, and over the next three weeks it runs every Wednesday and Saturday at 8pm, ending on Halloween.
It begins on a real mountain. Tikaboo Peak is a bare summit in the Nevada desert, about 26 miles from the Groom Lake base that everyone calls Area 51. It’s the closest public spot where you can still see the base, so people really do make the long drive and the steep climb to look down at it through long lenses. Our story is fiction. The mountain isn’t.
Cal Mercer is one of those people. He’s been climbing Tikaboo for years with a camera, a tripod and a notebook full of nights where nothing happened. He isn’t looking for trouble. He’s looking up, because he thinks the sky is too big to be empty.
“Tikaboo Peak” is his song, and it isn’t a calm one. It’s dark trip-hop for a night climb: a slow, heavy breakbeat, deep sub bass, glitchy electronics and an eerie theremin, with a falsetto voice that barely speaks. Most of it is instrumental. Near the end the guitars break loose into a solo, because something down in the valley has started to move.
He leaves the highway at dusk and follows the dirt road until it gives out.
The climb is short but steep, loose rock sliding under his boots in the dark. He uses a red headlamp so his eyes stay used to the night.
At the top he sets up the lens the way he always does, by feel, with cold hands.
Then he writes it all down. The date, the time, what he saw. Most lines end with the same word.
And then, at half past two, the wind drops and something starts to move.
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