As you can see, Flakie is not a sophisticated person by any means. He's spent most of his solitary life in the wilderness as a placer miner, panning for gold in the more remote streams and rivers. His only companion, until recently, was his old donkey, Blue. Miners cover a lot of territory in their lifetime, following the seasons and traveling the old gold routes across the Americas. So it's no stretch that one day Flakie and Blue ambled out onto a Texas plain with the hazy view of the city of Dallas off in the distance. After some considering, and hefting his bag of gold dust, Flakie had decided to make the grand sacrifice and go into the civilized world for a spell, maybe buy a new pair of boots, have a real bath, and a few nights out on the town.

         Well, just as he was tightening up on old Blue's cinch he happened to notice a strange mound nearby with a cave like opening. It was nearly covered in a tangle of old brush and tumble weeds but being the curious type Flakie decided to exert a little effort and investigate. After clearing some of the brush he found a partially collapsed entry passage with a most unusual high tech metal door set back in about ten feet. To Flakie, the locking mechanism looked like it had been blown away with a 12-gauge shotgun, or worse. We suspect that this damage, from Flakie's description of the holes, was actually the work of a very large three fingered hand with an opposing thumb.

         Flakie finally managed to slide the door open, after removing the rubble from its track, and peered into the darkness beyond. From what he could see it was a long regular tunnel with smooth walls and no noticeable shoring. We found this odd, for if this was a mine, we would have expected shoring and natural irregularities in the wall surfaces. So we surmised, from this information, the possibility that the structure was completely manmade and at some great cost. And it set our minds to wondering just who would have access to such large amounts of funding to build such a place.

         Now there is a kind of greedy hunger for discovery in a miner, and Flakie, being no exception, could feel the fine hair tickling in his nostrils. There was something of value down that dark tunnel, he could smell it. Of course Blue had more sense and wouldn't go close to the place. Flakie had to take off his pack and the halter and let Blue go off to graze, knowing he'd stay nearby. Then he made himself a small pack of what he called his essentials, grabbed his flashlight and pick axe and proceeded to go in and investigate the tunnel.

         There was something mighty strange about that tunnel; Flakie knew it as soon as he walked into it. He was struck most by a sharp metallic smell and the eerie hollow ringing sound his boot heels made hitting the ground. After a while, the tunnel took a turn and began to curve slowly downward, going deeper and deeper underground.

         Having only a flashlight for illumination and not much interested in anything but the glint of gold, Flakie wasn't too observant of his surroundings. But with a little gentle nudging he managed to recall a few minor but important details. For one, there were more metal doors set in the walls but all of them were locked tight. Also, what appeared to him, on thinking it over, light fixtures along the walls, and some buckled or broken metal tracks poking up perilously through the dirt and trash on the floor. By then we were all agreeing that this was definitely a manmade facility of institutional proportions and from its deteriorated condition, one that had been abandoned some years ago.

         Getting cold and feeling disappointed at not coming upon anything interesting, Flakie was just turning around to head back to the entrance, when his eye caught a faint violet glow in the darkness. Moving closer, he could see it was coming from two dirty windows, set in two large doors that met in the center, similar to loading doors, with the same pattern of breakage to the lock as that at the entrance door.

         Being a slight man in stature, Flakie had to stand on his tiptoes to clean off the glass with his kerchief and then hop up to eyeball over the window rim. What he saw near took his breath away. The room beyond was full of amethyst crystals glowing from some mysterious light source. Settling back on his heels to catch his breath, Flakie reflected on how it was that amethyst crystals could be just laying around at random like that. He'd found a few amethyst geodes in his time and heard the tall stories about veins being found, but never heard of crystals just scattered in loose piles on the ground. So he kind of figured someone had to be gathering up those crystals from some other place and stashing them in this room. After a few more hops to see if anybody was guarding the room, he tested the doors. They slid open so fast, he lost his balance and fell headfirst into the room, scattering crystals, some of which flew down strange narrow openings along the walls. Must have been mighty deep, because he never heard them land. After lying there a few minutes listening, he turned on his flashlight and made a quick survey of the cavernous room. Other than the crystals it looked vacant, except for what could have been some kind of crane hanging from the ceiling.

         But it was those crystals he was taken with. Never in his life had he seen anything so beautiful or so big. Some were clustered in groups of six to eight crystals measuring from three to four foot in height. We thought this might have been a small exaggeration, but then Flakie was nose to the floor looking at them. He figured they had to be worth a small fortune, but what he was mainly interested in was where they came from. Usually where there was crystals, there was bound to be gold nearby, and from the look of it, he figured it would have to be the mother of all Lodes.

         Crawling along crab-like he finally reached the back wall and checked for possible exits leading to more tunnels but found nothing except what looked like more metal grids. When he began edging his way slowly back to the main door, a sudden horrendous and gut-wrenching sound filled the room. Flakie stopped dead in his tracks, afraid to even turn his head toward the sound, and then he slowly melted to the ground.

         Someone or something, with a big mouth yawned hugely, then proceeded to make a long series of gross waking belches ending with grunting and lip smacking. After a few moments it began sniffing the air with feral interest and making almost human muttering sounds. Then it shifted its weight with cracking bones and stood up and began to plod heavily toward Flakie. Up to then, Flakie had only listened, but now, with the creature nearly upon him, he peered around a cluster of crystal and into the eerie violet haze that hung over the room.

         In what appeared to be a desperate situation, Flakie was still greedy enough to be hoping that this creature was intelligent, or stupid enough, so he could make some kind of a deal with it. But he wasn't altogether prepared for the apparition that rose up in front of him, or the size of its belly button, which was just about on the level with Flakie's nose.

         His description at this point becomes understandably vague and we were necessarily extremely careful in our questioning so as not to project our own ideas into his mind. From the angle Flakie had to raise up his head to see the full length of the creature we judged it to been almost double Flakie's height or close to ten feet tall. This also gave us a fair estimate of the size of this room, making it large enough to have possibly contained, at one time, some very large and sophisticated equipment. The grids and the aforementioned hollowness of the floors in this building suggest this room and its equipment could go down like an elevator.

         As for the creature, Flakie recalled it was hairy, very hairy around its face with long pointed ears and a terrible breath smelling like rotting pumpkin. He thought its body was either hairy or covered in skins. From his description it was certainly animal skins sewn in a primitive way, unless this creature suffered from a wasting disease that caused his skin to hang down in various and interesting folds and flap in the breeze, which we doubt. The fact that it had necklaces made of amethyst crystals around its neck and a crude marsupial-like pack strapped to its hips, leads us to think that this creature was somewhat more than an animal, such as a bear, as certain skeptics have suggested. We also discount the ideas about it being Big Foot. From the description of the creature and its obvious preoccupation with amassing wealth that was absolutely useless to it, we believe it had to have been a Troll.          {NEXT PAGE}