From: tprendergast@phenomen-x.com To: dg@phenomen-x.com Subject: DG Email Intercept 005 This one kept me up late so I thought I might as well send it out now. Hang in there. If you missed the previous messages, go to the forums at . We are recruiting volunteers to archive these messages on their web pages and have a couple signed up already. The more we get the harder it is for the DELTA GREEN conspiracy to suppress us! COURAGE! Thomas Prendergast Assistant Production Specialist & Webmaster Phenomen-X http://www.phenomen-x.com/ "Phenomen-X", "Watching the Watchers", and the Phenomen-X Logo are all Copyright 1990 Haley Productions. Comments made by employees in email do not necessarily represent the official statements or opinions of Haley Productions. --- >From: "Agent Graham" To: "Alphonse" Received: from unknown (HELO AGr098) (216.115.141.50) Status: Content-Type: text/plain;charset="iso-8859-1" Subject: Darker waters Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 16:44:11 -0500 Alphonse, After a day of digging through useless emails and term papers from Father Marks' university account, I re-interviewed Dr. Sophia Fernandez. When we first spoke, all I asked Dr. Fernandez was whether she had put Father Marks together with Dolores de la Cruz and whether she knew what the two of them talked about. She didn't know the substance of their conversation, as the Father had insisted upon privacy. She also couldn't venture a guess as to why Father Marks had been interested in talking with De La Cruz. I had left it at that, but then it struck me that while Dr. Fernandez couldn't tell me why De La Cruz was of interest to Father Marks, she could tell me why the old woman was important to the Islenos Cultural Center. Seems Dr. Fernandez is an ethnographer and linguist and one of her projects is tape-recording native speakers of the Islenos' Spanish dialect. It’s a dying language, with fewer and fewer speakers every year as the older generations die off. Dolores De La Cruz was one of Dr. Fernandez's favorite subjects for making these recordings. There are hundreds of hours of tapes of De La Cruz telling stories and singing songs in the Islenos dialect. Luckily for us, Dr. Fernandez did an amazing job cataloging them by content and subject matter. Even better, Dr. Fernandez created transcripts of the conversations with English translations. It didn't take long to find that there are several hours of tape where De La Cruz describes the 1905 Yellow Fever outbreak. And here's where we hit paydirt. De Le Cruz was a young girl at the time of the outbreak, fifteen years old. Living out in Saint Bernard Parish kept her and her family out of the way of the brunt of the outbreak, but the plague did spill out of New Orleans. She had an older brother named Fidel who worked the fishing boats, but also trapped when he couldn't get other work. She thinks it was in August of 1905 that she and her brother went out on his pirogue into the bayous to lay his traps. The two of them came across a huge, rusty old barge that was anchored on Lake Lery. They smelled it long before they saw the quarantine flags hanging from it. De La Cruz said that her father had warned her about approaching such barges during the plague season. During the outbreaks of the 19th century, those not wealthy enough to be buried immediately were tossed onto barges and floated down river where they would later be dumped into mass graves. Her father had told her and her siblings stories that such barges were to be avoided as the ‘miasma’ of the fever hung over them. Dolores' brother Fidel was sure that the stench of death would attract every alligator, nutria and raccoon for miles around and wanted to put out his traps nearby. They did so, and Fidel went back alone over the next couple of days to recover plenty of animals. One night however, Fidel didn’t come home until just before dawn, and when he did, he was pale as a ghost and shaking like he had the fever. Her brother could hardly speak and at first they feared that he did indeed have 'Yellow Jack.' They called for a doctor who told them that Fidel was suffering from some kind of nervous exhaustion, not the fever. It took days before he was able to speak clearly and calmly, and when he could speak he flatly refused to tell what happened to him on Lake Lery. Fidel did, however, warn Dolores never to go out to that barge ever again: "lest she imperil her very soul." Dolores tried to get Fidel to speak of what he saw, but he kept silent for decades. Whatever he saw deeply affected him. He lost all interest in people and the community around him and became a bit of a hermit. In 1943, Fidel was dying of lung cancer, having smoked himself into an early grave. He had few besides his family to attend to him at the end, and when he had received the last rights he asked that Dolores be sure that he would be buried at sea. This next part was not transcribed by Dr. Fernandez. She left this story out of the transcripts because she found it too lurid, embarrassing and probably the result of Fidel's mental illness, which she believes was an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. I had to get her to translate the tape as it played. Fidel wanted to be buried at sea because he wanted to be sure that "they" did not defile his body after his death. When Dolores asked him who he was talking about, he told her the story of what he had seen that night in 1905 when he had come to check on his traps. He said he was returning home late, after dark. It was then that he heard the sounds of music on the lake. A yacht of some kind was coming down the river from New Orleans. It was brightly lit and there was a band on board playing some kind of Cajun folk music. Watching from the cypress trees, Fidel saw the yacht moor itself next to the plague barge and the twenty or so people on board transfer over. Fidel described them as beautiful young men and women. They laughed and shouted as they stumbled over to the barge, carrying wine bottles, singing and lasciviously pawing each other. Fidel could not imagine that anyone could ever be so drunk as to board a plague barge, but one other detail struck him as even more bizarre. All the people were extremely well dressed, but their clothes were out of date. The quote from the tape was "like something from plantation times." Once aboard the plague barge the party continued in earnest. The sounds that emerged were like those of a raucous, drunken Mardi Gras ball. Despite his horror, Fidel watched, mesmerized by such an un-Christian display. Finally, for reasons he could not explain, he chose to venture closer, silently rowing his pirogue up to the side of the barge opposite the yacht. He could hear splashing noises as he approached. Something was being tossed over the side of the barge. The new moon provided little illumination, so he was unable to get a good look at what he these things were that were splashing lightly into the black river water until one landed in his boat. It was a human femur. It still had scraps of fetid meat attached and showed signs of having been gnawed on by some terrible beast. Fidel ascribed his deliverance to the intervention of the blessed Virgin who stilled the scream in his throat and allowed him to quietly steal away. Lucky bastard. And there’s one more point for our team. Father Marks didn't know about these tapes. He only knew that De La Cruz was a resource of the Isleno Cultural Center and that she had been interview by local historians on several occasions because of her excellent recollections and eloquence. So if he didn’t know, perhaps 'They' don’t know either. Nevertheless, I did my best to warn Dr. Fernandez that she might be in some danger. I also gave her the whole "I was never here and we never had this conversation" shtick. I have to admit, ever since 9-11 people take that James Bond shit a lot more seriously. She seemed dubious, but assured me she would be careful and call me if Father Marks, those two NOPD cops, or anyone else comes asking after those tapes. Who do we have that knows anything about necrophagia? Agent Graham