The Black Tapes · Pacific Northwest Stories

Episode 112 - Shadow Dancing

October 13, 2015·39 min·3 clips

Alex finds an identical demonic painting in a New Mexico cave, 5,000 miles from where it was first seen.

The trail starts in shadow. John describes the place as an old Anasazi site, then stays with the uncertainty around who they were and why they vanished. No one really knows, which is exactly where the episode starts to pull. The people the Navajo describe as ancient leave buildings, stories, and marks behind, but none of it behaves like proof. John has a reading. He says some scholars connect the name Anasazi with ancient enemies, then links the caves to religious ceremonies and violent ritual imagery. The response does not let that land too cleanly. When John points out separated limbs and heads on sticks, the dry pushback makes the scene feel less settled: maybe this is evidence, maybe it is projection, maybe both. Alex keeps moving. The mesa rises over her while John leads her along a narrow trail toward small caves in the cliff wall. The episode keeps the details tactile: petroglyphs, steep rock, low ceilings, and the nagging question of whether a mark means something or only looks like it does. Then John takes Alex higher, away from the usual etchings, to a larger space with the only petroglyphs in the area. That is where the resemblance hits. John says the painting looks a lot like the one in Alex's picture, and suddenly the landscape feels less like scenery and more like it knows something. Certainty never shows up. By the end, Alex is asking whether people see what they expect to see, or whether some parts of the world stay out of reach. She does not solve it. She leaves a quieter promise instead: she is still looking, and she will keep looking as long as listeners stay with her.

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